With a few words drawn from “Ghazal of Oranges,” by Jan-Henry Gray, and all the oranges changed to blues. I know well the faraway scent of blues, know the exact shade of warning blue, am still astonished by the strange fruits in my wheelbarrow full of blues. I have packed roomy wicker baskets with blues, or mostly blues— mandarin blue, this crop of blues, expensive blues, messy blues, blood[y] blues. Those days, months, years, peeling blues … I still love all the orange blues: azure, indigo, lapis lazuli, periwinkle, peacock, midnight, Nile, electric, Prussian, Wedgewood, navy, sapphire, sky… But not cobalt, not cyan or cerulean—I’m done with cold. And I’ve squeezed every last drop of juice out of steel and pewter.
Scrub pine—not a tree anyone wants to plant, but a runty one, a scrapper scrabbling out of miserable soil, windswept coastal lands. The kind of tree that even when young tends to be gnarled, if maybe a little beautiful in moonlight. A paltry shade maker. Pugilist. Porcupine. Thrusting fistfuls of green into the needling wind. A tree in which a starling preens his black. Backbreaking work, to endure in scrub lands—gripping the sandy earth, maybe over a lifetime making the dirt a tad less poor. Come spring, its seed cones have gone grey, plain enough beauty for even the old Puritans, that ancestral branch that tugs at my roots— a faint guilt at the occasional scarlet-painted toes or choice of wine over milk. But if you are pine, you don’t grieve overmuch about what can’t be helped—ancestors, bad soil, whether you have the spine to be scrub— you are here to impede the wind, you are here to take your time.
It’s true—sometimes I’ve envied other people’s poems, their burn, their glow. And maybe I’m not alone. But after seeing first images from the Webb telescope—a single rice grain of our universe!— how to envy now? All those whirling galaxies going back and back and back. Astronomers will argue which is oldest, closest to the very beginning—the Big Bang, that 13-point-something billion-year expansion—a peacock’s tail infinitely un-pleating, an origami’d telescope unfolding on and on… A poem can break your heart— like one called “Tinder,” about a bear whose paws are charred in one of our forest fires, a poem in which lines flick on like stars—a sonnet line by line igniting. A galaxy in a bear crawling out of a fire, a bear that must be put to death— the black hole at the heart of every life, maybe every congregation of stars. Now that we’ve looked through that great golden eye floating a million miles away, now that we’ve seen—if this universe were lit with only thousands, or even billions, of stars, how lonely that would seem. O astronomers, O other people’s poems, bring me your galaxies, your black bears.
Jennifer Stewart Miller was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Vermont and California. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, a JD from Columbia University, and a BA from Michigan State University. Her book Thief won the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize. Miller is also the author of A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015) and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.
Stills from Sunset Boulevard, 1950, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Director of Photography: John F. Seitz. Production Design: Hans Dreier & John Meehan. Costume Design: Edith Head
