Everything shimmers
with the sound of the train
rattling over the bridge
especially the ears and nostrils and teeth
...
Joseph Millar is an American poet. He was raised in western Pennsylvania and after an adult life spent mostly in the SF Bay Area and the Northwest, now lives in North Carolina. Millar received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1970. He has worked as a telephone installation foreman and commercial fisherman and in 1997 gave up this blue collar life to try his hand at teaching. He has poems about fatherhood, labor, relationships and the life of the American man in the 20th Century. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review, "DoubleTake," Ploughshares,Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Raleigh Review and Shenandoah. He has taught at Mount Hood Community College, Oregon State University. He now teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University and the Esalen Institute. He is married to poet Dorianne Laux; they live in Raleigh, North Carolina.)
One Day
Everything shimmers
with the sound of the train
rattling over the bridge
especially the ears and nostrils and teeth
of the horse riding out
to the pasture of death
where the long train runs
on diesel fuel
that used to run on coal.
I keep listening
for the crickets and birds
and my words fall down below.
I mistook the train for a thunder storm,
I mistook the willow tree
for a home, it's nothing to brag about
when you think of it
spending this time all alone.
I wandered into the hay field
and two ticks jumped in my hair
they dug in my scalp
and drank up my blood
like the sweet wine of Virginia,
then left me under the Druid moon
down here on earth in the kingdom.