May You Always be the Darling of Fortune

By Jane Miller b. 1949 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.

Jane Miller, "May You Always be the Darling of Fortune" from Many Junipers, Heartbeats, published by Copper Beech Press. Copyright © 1980 by Jane Miller. Reprinted by permission of Jane Miller.

Source: Many Junipers, Heartbeats (Copper Beech Press, 1980)

Biography

Poet Jane Miller was born in New York. Influenced by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Adrienne Rich, Miller’s layered poems juxtapose high and low diction in an exploration of consciousness that is at once structural and intimate. In a 2006 interview with Greenbelt magazine, Miller discussed the relation of her early career as a painter to the composition of her poetry: “I use and have brought forward . . .

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