Sleep in the Wild
I feel it too, the heavy
bottom weight sinking, the rest
of the body buoyant. Look
at whales in sleep, their vertical drift
bearing them off to wherever
the water is going. Even here,
the lake riffles its fingers
in wind, and peace is not
stillness at all. We’re all
in motion—sixteen pelicans
herding fish with the nets
of their bills, a trout
skipping in and out
of the boat’s shadow,
even the diamond lace
of sun on the lake’s
bottom of mud and furred
timbers. We’re all
in some kind of sleep here too,
I feel it, my cells suspended,
a buoy half-leaning in a dream,
a dragonfly riding on the deck.
Whatever state—wakened,
dark, between—it drifts
in the body all through
the long-held breaths.
As the Crow Flies
Mount Angel Abbey
turns out to be sideways,
then still, as it surfs
a high swell of storm,
flexing, unfurling
the old geometry of art—
now there’s a second,
rival or stranger, reckoning
but no symmetry, one now
a sail shoved by the blast
and tiny and gone, the other
strafing low, near, through
the cedars, then lifting—
landing, a grasp, a pull,
disappearing in a branch’s
wild, soft sleeve
Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Catamaran, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. A recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon.
Header photo by wildestanimal, courtesy Shutterstock.
