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Heir

By Josephine Miles 1911–1985 Josephine Miles

This gray board fence turns blue in the evening light

And the sycamores reign down upon it their diadems,

And blue and green batter in wood and stems

The stems of light

Their green and golden gems.

At once, out of a million years of energy,

All turn to flesh,—board, gate, and branch—

With that quick sunset wrench

Which seems like chance,

Out of the fashion of an entropy.

If then the flesh is yours, as now it is,

I have lost yard, sunset, and all

Into a mild greeting, and I call

The sunset to your thought, to tell it is

Parent apparent to your rich apparel.

August 1954

Source: Poetry (October 2012).

Biography

Lifelong California resident Josephine Miles distinguished herself as an educator, spending her entire academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the first woman to be tenured in the English department. She is remembered as the editor of anthologies and critical texts, as an author of books on poetic style and language, and as an award-winning poet who produced over a dozen books of poems. Her . . .

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