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How a Single Word
by Jesse Millner These days I reflect upon my strange youth: thirteen schools in twelve years, growing up in California, Oregon, and Washington. But each summer I found myself back on the Southside of Virginia at my grandpa’s farm, tying up June bugs with twine, watching them orbit the skinny planet that was myself, their emerald bellies so beautiful in hot August suns, reflecting back the mystery that is bug, light, and the buzzing symphony of insect wings slicing the humid southern air. These days the soft Virginia dusks have sunken further into memory and the only way I can reach back is through the steady beat of syllables, that become words, that summon scenes, that become the surprising cloth of whole worlds spinning through another century, summoning my great-great grandpa, Sam, buried alive at the Battle of the Crater in Petersburg, Virginia in 1865 as Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia struggled to survive in the bloody days before Appomattox. His wife, Annie, lost five infants after childbirth, so she never named a daughter until she’d lived for a month. Annie knew we have to be careful with names, how a single word, blue, when added to another, ridge, becomes a whole chain of mountains filled with oak, cedar, and tulip poplars that spread their wings like angels in the greening spring. I Watched Grandma's Hands as they tapped the black upright’s keys she played sometimes in the unheated hallway where I first listened to the music of this world. When she sang “In the Garden” during that sweet, early time, I could imagine Jesus looking down from the frothy cumuli stirred by the early sun that spoke from the Virginia sky. This was the truest hymn, sung by a human voice, shaped by breath and tongue into a real prayer. And I wondered where the singing went after it rose past the high ceilings of the farmhouse? Yesterday, someone said someone else said prayer is the breath words are spoken with. I've breathed a lot as I accrue my earthly allotment of prayers, little birds sent out just before the dusk descends onto my sleep, just before the dream of little birds ascending rustles leaves in the forest where the accumulation of prayer and wing beat settles, and at last a true thing is wistfully spoken. Yesterday, someone said someone else said why breathe words that aren’t prayers, then? |
Jesse Millner's work has appeared most recently in Real South Magazine, Squalorly, and The Best American Poetry 2013. He lives in Fort Myers, Florida with his wife, Lyn, and dog, Henry.
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