Poem I Love: Jane Miller's "Miami Heart"

I once heard Jane Miller recite this poem in a large amphitheater in the Midwest where I swear she read the whole thing in one breath. I love the pace of the poem--how it speeds up, slows down, and finally ends in a rich silence--and what I take to be its clever allusion to Denise Levertov's "O Taste and See" and Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much with Us".

Miami Heart

In a long text, on live tv, in an amphitheater, in the soil,
after the post-moderns, after it is still proven
you can get a smile out of a pretty girl,
after the meta-ritual lectures,
after the flock to further awareness bends “south,”
and Heinz switches to plastic squeeze bottles,
as one flies into St. Louis listening to Lorca’s “Luna, luna, luna...,”
beyond Anacin time,
after, God help us, the dishwasher is emptied again,
and Miss America, Miss Mississippi, reveals she has entered 100 pageants
since age six,
Packer’s ball, first down after a fumble,
the corn detassled,
the assembly of enthusiasms awakened,
and we meet in a car by the river
not not kissing, considering
making love, visiting Jerusalem, the awful daily knowledge
we have to die in a hospital on the sixth floor, in a lecture, on live tv,
or in an amphitheater at half-time,
at one’s parents’ condo, over pasta,
in a strange relative’s arms, in debt, along the coast, staring
at a lighthouse, the heart bumping, bumping the old pebble up the old spine,
a squirrel scared up a sycamore by an infant,
along this stench of humility, along that highway of come,
charge card in hand,
I shall give my time freely
and the more I dissemble the more I resemble
and the more I order the more I reveal I hide,
the better, the faster
I sleep the more I remember
to go elsewhere,
a movie, excuse me, now I must whisper
not to disturb the patrons,
now I must drive, now park, tramp to the edge of the world,
roughness, ferocity, cannibalism,
bite, chew, transmogrify,
inside the lungs the little revolutionaries, between the thighs the reflex
it’s too this, it’s too that, it’s not enough,
similarly, and more particularly, it’s raw twice over,
it’s the imagination draining its husks, left-handed,
because comparison is motive, which is why
one writes with one’s desire.

Find "Miami Heart" and more Jane Miller poems here.