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ISBN 978-0-9754990-6-1 / $16

Midnights
poetry by Jane Miller
artwork by Beverly Pepper
introduction by C.D. Wrights

The fourth in Saturnalia Books Poet/Artist Collaboration Series

$16

"An absorbing performance of art taken to the brink. There is nothing prosaic about Midnights. No one is simply cooking carrots; rather all of its parts contribute to a gestalt of living, loving and losing in a reel of feeling that nonetheless attains a bracing lucidity. This is an incandescent text, and Beverly Pepper’s drawings hold its ardor to its mark."
—C.D. Wright

i

Those who make it north across the border to Tucson have considered what are power and slavery. Those of us asleep can only dream we are running, thirsty, scared, and wounded, through a forest of stinging cacti, with helicopters spraying light like an automatic garden sprinkler, an automatic weapon spraying death, which keeps coming round to little blue violets expiring of thirst, dying of exposure. It takes more than a broken poet,

more than the most sacred heart, more than a cathedral to hold them in its embrace, these women and girls and boys and men being fired upon. Those of us who are writers write about the forlorn. They are not we in any case.

Yet, we are all mixed up in this test of love, order, disorder, and dishonor. What is your secret? Your shame? Your guilt? Your thrill, at whose expense? Jew, neither your shaved head because you are enslaved, nor your shaved head because, by your own people, you are betrayed, makes us all Jews.

There is the line, What difference would one day make?, which appears in the film Head in the Clouds, about an irresistible woman who appears to be collaborating with the Nazis during World War II,

except she is really in the French underground. Unfortunately, one of the good citizens of her village slits her with a knife before the villagers find out, the next day, that she was one of them. Even after learning the truth, her murderer still felt in his heart that she betrayed his sister to save others, sacrificed his sister, in effect; his guilt is not simple, not black and white. Nor is hers; the actor playing the Nazi officer’s mistress spoke courageously in an interview about guilt, responsibility, and justice. The conversation dwindled, and she added, minorly, “Unfortunately, we shot a scene at Sacré-Cœur on our last night [that] didn’t make the film, which was really sad. But it was just incredible to have that entire church closed down. It was two in the morning and [we were] just kind of watching the view and shooting the scene.”

I admire that Charlize Theron indulges in a private thought on beauty, hours after midnight, and shares it with a stranger, an interviewer, a writer trying to capture an intimate reflection. Notwithstanding, the film, of course, is as important as the actor, because, through her, the film represents insanity beyond designated border, long past midnight,

metaphorically, in the life of the twentieth century. This one dead sister, a subplot really, of the film, is dead, by mistake? Bad luck? A choice? A sacrifice? Neither philosopher nor historian, I can only be returned, by the film, closer to home, to ask a Mexican who wants to be American,

an American Mexican, a Mexican who works in America, an American American, who vacations in Mexico, like a Russian American, an Italian American, or possibly a Jewish American (i.e., special religious American category, as in Arab American, not a country of ancestry but an ancestry of spirit, as when referring to Mexico as Catholic, or indigenous, or rebellious, or revolutionary). Who answers for the dead sister caught in a crossfire? My nightmare as a writer

is that I will have to say something. Yes, I must speak for the sister. Please, she is dead. Her death saved others. A martyr. Is it clear why she dies? Her brother would like to know, please, what happened, to blame whom? First, he makes a choice; he knows whom to blame. Then, he feels how? I would like to hold him in my arms.

The dead are becoming dead at the Mexican border because, in their case, they are not someone’s sisters who became exposed passing information meant to save a dozen lives. They are moving their own bodies, one at a time, through a desert with armed helicopters hovering thirty yards above the pricked earth. A wall is being built to make crossing the border harder. I have failed to leave plastic water bottles in designated places for the crossing. Nor, I confess, can I get a man who slit a woman’s throat, in revenge, to understand death. I cannot correct death, nor take down so much as an emotional wall without a pill and a glass of treated water. I can only make a safe drive across an unprotected border into Arizona from California, lost in thought, Head in the Clouds. (I watch movies, I read books. Therefore, what?) Therefore Reality? Where is it?

There’s the Seine, seen in the far distance from one of the world’s great cathedrals at the head of Montmartre. I want to live in the world in my right mind. And here is one survivor, without a lesson in mind, with the walls of his religion completely detonated, the cathedral of his family completely detonated, and the view from a great mind completely detonated. Here is poet Paul Celan, and he jumps into the moving river.

In his pocket calendar he has written, “Depart Paul.”

Midnights is Jane Miller's tenth collection. Her other books include Wherever You Lay Your Head; Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems; The Greater Leisures, a National Poetry Series selection; and August Zero, winner of the Western States Book Award. She is a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award for Poetry, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.

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Last Update: January 19, 2008