Some books leap off the bookshelf, insisting that they be read. Carolyn Miller's Light, Moving was just such a book for me. From its title to its cover art — also by the poet — to its epigraph from Issa's The Spring of My Life, it spoke to me.
When I fanned through its pages, the 35-line invocation "Considering Flynn" first caught my eye. As a lover of all felines, I was entranced. It begins:
For he is the color of a fog bank over the ocean in late afternoon.
For his eyes are lined with charcoal gray like Cleopatra's...
before revealing — and reveling in — his true gifts:
For he sometimes gulps happiness when I hold him.
For his cry is small, and he purls, which is meowing with the mouth closed.
For his ancestor Jeoffrey was beloved by a poet who went mad. ...
For he is filled with Buddha nature.
For he does both the Up- and Downward-Facing Dog and, of course, the Cat.
For he attends to all his needs.
For he purrs.
This is my kind of poet.
Of course the collection, as the title suggests, is about far more. In its four sections — The Slanted Streets, The Memory of Light, In The Garden, and The World As It Is — the poet brings close attention both to the seen and the unseen.
"In Summer," after describing morning light "in a city where trees keep their leaves," the poet leaps — and we follow — to:
...suddenly the growing crowd
of my dead were close at hand.
I write their birthdays on my calendar each year
so I can keep them still
part of this flux, this wide sea, this spill
of light, this whir of wings sounding in my ear.
The collection is shot through with light, changing and moving but always attending to life. Miller gives the concluding poem a title from a line by Rumi, and by the time we read its opening lines, they have an earned resonance.
In "How Long Should You Look at the Earth's Face?" she exhorts:
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...
Light, Moving is a beautiful publication by Sixteen Rivers Press, a nonprofit poetry collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.
