Sprawled
Asleep
By
David P. Miller
Nixes
Mate Books
Nixesmate.pub/books
Allston,
Massachusetts
ISBN:
978-1-949279-21-4
70
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Too
often contemporary poetry dwells on the versifier rather than the
verse. The confessional reigns and the uniqueness and self-importance
of the poet drives both the narrative and the music. In the worst and
most extreme examples of this navel-gazing art the poet and his
readers develop an unhealthy bond of elitism, which separates them
from any objective world view and renounces the joy of detail shared
by soulful creation. David Miller’s first full length book,
Sprawled Asleep, does not do this. Its meditations are directed by an
exactness of observation that deemphasizes the poet-observer to the
point of irrelevance. As this poet-observer fades, his objects
achieve a singular, eye-opening clarity that leaves one somewhat
stunned. The motif in which this observer delineates his objects is
often mass transportation. Alienation, counter intuitive as usual,
finds a niche here.
In
his poem Look at the Sky Miller seeks word precision in his
atmospheric scan. He does identify the observer’s position as in a
bus, his intellectual preparation (it doesn’t take), and his
sensory limitations. The piece opens with directness,
Pinned
and plunging beneath the flat
of
a thunderhead, a thick purple-
bruised
ceiling more threatening
than
night’s translucent black.
The
bus scrambled out
from
beneath that dark table,
toward
the blue shelf
opened
at the horizon.
I
can write thunderhead.
Or write
these:
horsetails,
lenticular,
buttermilk
sky. What I want:
to
exhale ah!
Altostratocumulus.
To
know the mundane sky
direct
as knowing the breath.
No
study or action of mind.
Gaze,
or Don’t, Miller’s poem of humorous denial or, perhaps, faux
resurrection, triumphs with deadly accurate observations and
deductions. The poet considers the life or death evidence pertaining
to an unmoving sedentary elderly man attracting some attention from
his fellow travelers on the subway. A determination is made in the
heart of the poem,
Men
in shirts of Egyptian cotton,
suede
shoes of charcoal grey,
slumped
at the railings in end seats,
chins
at their chests, wide woven hats
upside
down at their feet,
are:
asleep.
Asleep
at the end
of
the line and asleep
when
the train switches back.
Sleeping
for us who gaze, or don’t
at
scaly red arms, the flushed crown
of
a head, smart slim-fit jeans.
See
his fingers are twitching.
Miller
zeroes in on the mass of humanity in his poem Landscape with Hilton.
He opens with the portrait of an elderly female beggar holding a
paper cup in a wash of playgoers exiting a theatre. His action then
moves to his well-drawn sketch of a waitress in a Faux-Fifties
restaurant and past door men ushering a wealthy man to a taxi. This
stratified jumble of society mixes in just the right way to elicit
the connective Aha of memetic recognition. Next the poet surprises by
etching historical contexts into the denouement of his urban
landscape. The poem concludes this way,
Slide
one block to the Tenderloin—
pale
block letters against brick
remember
Elegantly
Furnished Rooms
Private
phones Steam Heat
Hot
Water Elevator Service
Private
Baths $20 Month.
Above
the sidewalk, a voided sign
for
a vanished café, shaft rising
toward
Corinthian columns and satellite dish,
overpainted
entirely in white.
Taking
one step beyond his usual ruminations, Miller’s deadpan tone of
“just the facts, Ma’am” becomes almost Kafkaesque in his piece
entitled Someone Else’s Daughter. Time in this strangely enclosed
dimension intertwines with movement and thus with breath. The mode of
transportation becomes more real than the travelers, who are reduced
to mere passersby status. Instinct drives knowledge. Consider these
lines,
The
same train on the same rail
enters
the same tunnel. Two faithful
train-on-track
tones: the upper
thickens
as tunnel walls resound
overtones
against the body. Remember
how
your dog always sat up when the Rambler
slowed,
two turns before the house?
The
train returns to open air and you rise,
Open
eyes, the dog coming home.
My
favorite piece in this extraordinary collection Miller entitles
Another Poem About Fireflies. But this is not your generic firefly
poem straining to connect the microcosm with the macrocosm. Instead
Miller’s delightful meditation happens after he is drawn onto his
porch by a misconception. He thinks he hears a soft rainfall or
drizzle, but the basis of his sensory perception is rather the sound
of leaves caught in an air draft. Nature sometimes surprises and this
confused state can illuminate other mysteries. The poet notices how
his objects assume a fuller reality as his perception withdraws.
They dominate this shared world, and, to some extent, dispossess
mankind. The poet describes his irrelevance,
I
don’t remember when I last saw
fireflies,
and I don’t know if I will ever
see
them again. So stark, their white-yellow signals
pull
from deep in the yard across the street,
and
down the street. Each its own light-
point
cycle, so many aerial lighthouses.
Flash
cycle nebula densing the more
the
more I abandon eye focus. This erratic
point
cloud beneath tides of treetops,
and
me in the fade to black…
The
abnegation of self becomes an exquisite meditation and more in the
collection’s concluding poem, Half the Day is Night. On the surface
an ode to autumn’s equinox, the piece delves into eternal
stillness. The poet outdoes himself in these lines,
I
sit outside this dark September night.
The
hand of dusk across my heart, my spine
caressed
by stillness. The listening to come
to
what there is to hear when nothing is to hear.
Miller’s
remarkable poems lead us beyond his uncommon, well-wrought
observations. They verge on the ethereal and visionary. Sprawled
Asleep deserves serious artistic acclamation.
