Joe Milford's World

It's rare to read poems that really surprise me, that don't seem to fit into a mold of any kind, but that's a great attribute of Joe Milford. His images are vivid and fluid, and he writes with authority, wonder, and sometimes playfulness. There's a lot going on in his poetry; it's a feast.

Joseph Victor Milford was born in Alabama in 1972. He began writing poetry at an early age, and it eventually led him to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa where he achieved his MFA in poetry. He has been published in dozens of print and online journals, and his first collection of poems, Cracked Altimeter, was published by BlazeVox books in 2010. He is also the host of the Joe Milford Poetry Show, a radio show featuring contemporary poets from Canada and America. He has also been a professor of English for over a decade.

 

Towards Dusk

 

Trying to own an afternoon

a snowglobe or watch

stopped and handed down

from a grandfather

an ex-girlfriend

the elusive afternoon

always shedding its scales

while clipping its toenails

in a sunlit attic room

while the machinery

gasps steam from across

the railroad tracks as this

afternoon crochets afghans

to be unraveled by other

machinations of time 

and each day unbuttoning

its waistcoat to spill out

radio shows and maps

of a country of strip-malls

and starvation as the cable

goes unpaid and lost transmissions

whittle at the roots of oaks

with a humid halitosis

as a Ferris Wheel crashes through

our houses and grinds 

our neighborhoods into clippings

of old news and then spins

like a coin losing its centrifugal 

force to finally fall to its side

making a crop circle, the signature

of the catastrophe and cornucopia

of the harvest and the chaff

of the mute scrapbooks webbed

together by spiders every afternoon.

 

 

Divorce Proceeding

 

You eat at the foot

of the tower because

that's the only place

in the city where you can't

see the tower.

 

I eat at the top

of the tower

because that's the only place

in the world

where I can't see you.

 

 

Excerpts from 23 Impressions of Cormac McCarthy

 

9.

Wading into the grey

Lake, every step pondering

What leviathan lies beneath

The still waters, what bracken

Skin will slither across ankles

 

10.

What does he mean

By “the autistic dark”?

I think I know when I hear

The howls over the stark

Flat plain dusted with the resin

Of flattened ancient kingdoms

 

16.

An hourglass in a sandstorm

A divining rod on the ocean floor

A flint frozen in an iceberg

A river under a burning bridge

A flower vulcanized and preserved in ash

A soul inside a man