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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.

Lincoln Road is where the tourists are, and where the Miamians are, and where the people going to the beach are. It’s also where the Starbucks and the over-priced restaurants with names like “Paul” are. It’s beautiful.

 

The reader—who wants to know what the hell this poem means—is an actress and musician who had been performing on the street when I approached her. She’s reading “Miami Heart” by Jane Miller. Miller, born in New York, was a painter before she was a poet. “I use and have brought forward many of the reasons why I was attracted to painting into my poems,” Miller once said. “For example, I make use of color and design, so the structure of poetry, that’s related, and it’s a lot like making the underpainting for a painting.” Her poems include both simple and highly sophisticated language, and are somewhat 'stream-of-conscious.' “Reading Jane Miller’s poetry,” critic Terri Sutton once noted, “is like channel-surfing on acid: her deliberately interrupted narrative warps and weaves and makes the familiar strange and the strange recognizable as something you might have put away in a shoebox.” Miller has won several awards, including the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award. “Miami Heart” can be found in Memory At These Speeds.