Tsundoku
Japanese: stack of unread books
Block-printed on a Bread and Puppet banner –
wheat sprouts from an open book. When I stop
to look at this cotton cloth lit in the window
I remember why, against all downsizing advice,
my wife and I will buy more bookcases.
(Daytime’s overcast gray seems like pale silver.
Full moonlight stops me in front of this picture,
on nights when insomnia aligns with astronomy.)
The heart of new bread
quickens from the spread pages.
They present a patch of earth
it could take anyone’s lifetime to read.
I’ll come to the end of my reading years
before its fertility dies.
And yet, my tsundokus diminish.
I thought I raced against time, but instead
it was against not-having-read
all those piled pages. Who is this person,
without too many unbegun, unfinished books,
with light held in a picture of wheat?
Major Seventh
I was probably in seventh grade then,
I often tell myself or explain to you,
remembering moments like the first time
I grasped Bach counterpoint.
sailing up into the living room over the stereo.
was rational.
adventurous but became expert at flying,
ravished, inside my skull.
as baroque brass choirs caromed left to right.
each vibrating body insisting its own dissonance.
Or devouring layered feedback
from a grand piano filled with microphones.
on an open-reel tape recorder, seized razors
and splicing tape.
with shards of Mozart’s Jupiter scrambled
around a pal’s electric random guitar.
might also be now. Might be
this tells you something of a boy still living.
read my teachers’ penciled notes.
I still try to learn from their instructions.
boat trip, ivories left, ebonies right,
as if I were thirteen and falling into place.
on the covered-bridge stoneware mug.
Beneath the table, the jeans I wear fade
silently, as food scraps in a bucket –
onion skins, gone-by coleslaw –
prepare their afterlife as compost.
A cut-paper lotus flower sits on the window rail.
November morning’s condensation sun-glitters
through its empty petals. Earlier,
dreams I’m not sure I had troubled my body.
The pencil’s tip rubs the notebook,
strokes graphite sounds against my fingertips.
Outside, bare tree limbs flow to their trunk
like a watershed. Our neighbors in back
have unbolted their Sukkot booth.
All this while the heater purrs. All this,
with the yard brown, crackled,
the mug turned chill. Warming air passes
across my hands and I want to know:
what was that, that slid away from me?
after Jane Wong’s “I put on my fur coat”
On this inn’s wide porch
our third summer stretches out
with overhead canvas striped,
sheltering breakfast tables
in wrought iron, companion chairs,
from afternoon’s lightning rainfall.
She and I bring books into dusk.
Air-bodies of moisture
shift position in layers
and patches. A small fog
gathers, upright, below
the apple trees. Mist curtains
drop between hills
like theater canvas.
Sky forms fuse and drift.
Continental cloud rafts go
orange and pink: by degrees
it turns too dark to read.
But not to watch.
Such an evening, settled
into our bodies like the deepest-
rooted in any memory, held
like porcelain somehow still intact.
July nightfall, a murmur made visible.
It’ll come back to me if I stop trying to force it: what’s that call?
Aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaa: it’s lived in my ears longer than memory,
but the bird’s label eludes me. Better to simply watch
down the Inn’s slope of retired apple trees and away
to three ranges of waved hills receding ahead of my chair
at a round iron table under a striped canvas awning.
Mist hovers the gaps between layers of Berkshires.
I’ve arrived at the breakfast porch so far ahead of breakfast
that the speakers hovering up in the corners are silent.
There’s a layer of cicada for listening, plus slight traffic
along Richmond Mountain Road, tires on blacktop
like ocean waves, rising and passing, warbled at this hour
with several bird songs I’ve never yet known how to name.
I’m allowing myself to sit with this, this almost nothing to hear
as the speakers bless me with no recorded music, no velvet jazz
with rippling piano, musing muted trumpet. Yesterday morning
before breakfast it had already come outside. Not belligerent,
not even loud. But someone within the Inn followed the reflex.
A person touched the usual button somewhere inside. Sound already
granted the name of “music” moved across the breakfast porch, pasted over
what was here already, what anyone could already hear as if it were music.
I understand. No one inside with a button-pressing, switch-flicking finger
means to overwhelm the outdoors. It’s not domination. It’s domestication.
Two crows appear in silhouette, sailing across the middle-distance tree line.
Of course! Those were crow caws. How fine to have briefly forgotten.
Author’s Statement on Beauty
I distinguish beauty from the pleasing similar to how one might untangle elegance from suavity. It seems to me that beauty exists when any being most lucidly expresses its own life-magnifying nature. “Being” includes living beings, of course, but also objects, whether existing in nature or manufactured (…) This idea of beauty allows beings to mature into beauty. It also allows rediscovery of beauty in artworks or other made things which fall out of fashion. Responding to beauty in this sense allows for great expanses of absorption, engagement, and delight.
David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Nixes Mate Books published his Sprawled Asleep in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Reed Magazine, and Tar River Poetry, among other journals. David is a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets and co-directs their Chapter and Verse literary reading series. He is a member of the New England Poetry Club’s Board of Directors and is the recipient of a 2025 Tanne Foundation award.