MAY YOU ALWAYS BE THE DARLING OF FORTUNE
by Jane Miller
March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides
into rain. The imperceptible change begins
out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new
craving, spring. May your desire always overcome
your need; your story that you have to tell,
enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world
you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging
from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things
fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because
now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting
the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything
wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I
vigilant.
SOURCE: “May You Always be the Darling of Fortune” appears in Jane Miller‘s collection Many Junipers, Heartbeats (Copper Beech Press. Copyright, 1980), available at Amazon.com.
PAINTING: “Queen Guinevere’s Maying” by John Collier (1900).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jane Miller is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the National Poetry Series selection The Greater Leisures (1983), Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems (1996), and the book-length poem A Palace of Pearls (2005). Her collaborations include the prose poetry collection Black Holes, Black Stockings (1985), with poet Olga Broumas, and Midnights (2008), in which Miller’s poetry and prose pair with the chalk and oil drawings of artist Beverly Pepper. Miller is also the author of Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel (1992). Miller has received the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award and the Western States Book Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Goddard College, and the University of Arizona, where she has served as program director.
Silver Birch Press 