Michael Miller is the publisher of Moon Tide Press. His most recent collection of poetry, The First Thing Mastered, was released in 2013 from Tebot Bach, and he has had work published in Poetry Quarterly, Sage Trail, Faultline and other journals. His other credits include the chapbook Thief After Dark (FarStarFire Press, 2002) and the full-length collection College Town (Tebot Bach, 2010). He has served as a judge for Poetry Out Loud and the San Diego Book Awards and organizes the poetry series at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, California.---------
The Glass
Whose hand it was
that pushed the wine glass in
we never allowed ourselves to know.
A simple pull of the doorknob
would have given a face
to the thin white-haired wrist,
the spider-leg fingers that nudged open a crack
to our upstairs bedroom
each Fourth of July
and slipped in the dark brimming glass
while the voices downstairs
slowed with toasts and time.
Prudent enough, we could have listened
for which voice rejoined them
after the hand disappeared,
but awake on our sleeping bags
and high on the breeze through the window,
we spun tales about the stranger—
the shadowy drifter like the scarecrow
that hung on the neighbors’ porch
and turned on our whims
to the hitchhiker or the man from Jupiter.
For the three of us,
a single glass sufficed.
None of us would drop our guard
to let a grimace show,
to hint that the bitter taste, the bite of alcohol
made us long for the sweet and soft again.
We slept those nights conceding
that the wine was wiser than us,
that our tongues would grow into it
like our bodies would grow
into our brothers’ coats.
For the moment, holding our drink,
we had captured a speck more of that world.
The pine cones stocked in our makeshift forts
would split the air like real grenades.
The football, thrown as high as we could,
would spiral perfectly against the sun.
The Trail
It blinked at us on the way home from school,
the hole in the chain-link fence
by the cinderblocks that marked off the playground,
its severed ends twisted toward us declaring
that whatever escaped had fled in our direction.
Behind it, the dirt path hovered straight,
then bent around the briars, the torn milk carton
and split-open sandal the only hints
of what had been dropped. Someone had vanished
on the trail, the stories went in class,
the who and when changing every time.
One night, we made a dare to run through it,
one of us assigned to carry the flashlight
and another to serve as watch in back.
The party snuck out through the window at 1.
When our feet felt the pavement end, we sprinted.
Shaking and thrilled, every reason good enough
to run until our legs could go no faster,
we chased the bend around lightless yards
and willows that dangled like closing fists,
the flashlight’s dancing beam making suspects
of the branches rustled from behind
and the tracks that spiraled into ditches.
When we came to the cabin and the headless horse,
we bolted back. Our feet stretched the hole wider,
pounded the sidewalks until the window took us in.
Years later, each of us admitted
that he came back in days to walk the trail alone,
the cabin revealed as the shell of the fun zone
and the horse the last bones of the carousel.
Its rusted pink, at the top of the pole,
pointed over fallen sheds and rock-scuffed yards,
the side of the city too beaten to stand.
But we each declared ourselves the victor then.
In every brave mission, there had to be a victor.
One had to say that he took a second more to run,
that he had let the monster get nearer.