Light, Moving
by Carolyn Miller

“Carolyn Miller is a poet of the world as it is, but when she looks outward she sees marvels: ‘dark lamb’s blood/of dogwood,’ for instance. Or, in a lovely trope, seeing carrots from below, ‘underground, bright . . . torches.’ Or primroses ‘cheerful / as crayons.’ The world—shot through with delights, shadowed by death, freighted with its vicissitudes—undergoes transformations through the poet’s language and perception. The result is a resolute, unqualified joy in being.”

—Frank X. Gaspar, author of Night of a Thousand Blossoms

CAROLYN MILLER is a writer, editor, and painter living in San Francisco. Her first standard collection of poetry, After Cocteau, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2002. Two letter-press limited-edition books of poems, This Is Mine (2005) and Constant Lover (2001), have been published by Protean Press. Her poetry has received the James Boatwright Award for Poetry from Shenandoah, and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3. She leads writing workshops in France and San Francisco.

POEMS FROM Light, Moving

Childhood Rivers

You must approach them slowly, for they are

rimmed with green fur and slippery stones. The smell

of them rises up and you walk through it,

like velvet curtains parting. The pebbles clank

beneath your feet, and dragonflies sail by, purple-

blue and iridescent, and the fur stirs in the green

water, and tadpoles waggle through, and leeches

and sucker fish try to grab your toes, and the air

above the water opens like a promise that will be fulfilled

over and over in your life, this mix of danger and solace,

fear and sudden joy, as if you could become part of the river

and at the same time rise above it on your dragon-dark,

rainbow-silvered wings.

How Long Should You Look at the Earth's Face?

Until you have memorized it, feature for feature, so

you can remember it, like your mother’s voice

in the room of your skull, speaking to you for the last time

over the phone, saying, “Are you happy?” Until

you are dumb with astonishment at having been given

so much: waterfalls, the ocean of air, insects

consumed with the world of insects, the sacrifice

of blossoms, fruit that ripens and dies.

Until you know that no matter what other life you live,

you will remember the smell of river water,

the chemical odor of ozone after rain, the solidity

of objects and the shadows that follow them,

food in your mouth, skin against your skin.

ORDER BOOK

paperback / 96 pages
ISBN 978-0-9767642-9-8
price: $16

Ted Kooser chose Carolyn Miller's poem “The World as It Is” for his American Life in Poetry column 269.

Philip Levine selected Light, Moving for his contribution to “The Editors’ Shelf” in the Winter 2009-10 issue of Ploughshares: “A woman goes about her life; she completes those common tasks she needs to stay useful and alive. She remembers the past, those she loved, those she failed to love enough. She puts it down in poems that never claim more than they deserve, and in the end they deserve all the attention the reader can bring, for they come as close to beauty and wisdom as poems come these days. While it’s true Ms. Miller is a Bay Area poet, these are neither New Age nor Language poems. Their music and vocabulary draw their strength from the best that has endured in poetry in English from Wyatt to Williams, and while they are original, they are also as ordinary as bread or wine.”

Garrison Keillor read Carolyn Miller's poem "A Warm Summer in San Francisco" on his program The Writer's Almanac on July 5, 2009, and her poem "Rose Garden, Summer Solstice" on July 6, 2009.