In Memory of Miller Williams, scientist, poet, father, husband, professor, et al.

Miller Williams, who died on January 1, 2015

 

A poem written in 1999 as an entry in the Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas's Sybil Nash Abrams Award. It didn't place.  In 2004, it won a 3rd Place in the AWC's Rosa Zagnoni Marioni Award. Later that year, it won 3rd Place in Nina Tillery's National Poetry Day award. This is the first publication.

 

As part of an audience with her poetry professor, she accents her Adoro with lines from the Master's poems

 

We sit on his porch

watching the lightning

from yonder Ozark ridge.

 

Thunder rumbles

like the should and oughts

of his father's early sermons.

 

When your father dies,

take notes somewhere inside.

Taut skin stretches over his head

 

as if pinned at the nape.

Once dark and bushy, his hair

now pale and tame, has slipped slow

 

as a glacier into a neckline fringe.

Magnified by tortoise shells,

his dark eyes sink like marbles.

 

But pity the hand whose closing

scissors excise him

and sever the U of A Press.

 

Despite Frank and football,

the literati will have none of it.

Like fans on fall Saturdays,

 

we boo and hiss and leave off

breathing until it is restored.

His poems navigate between

 

innovation and tradition

like a Buffalo River canoeist.

Similes shimmer; some titles

 

are longer even than their texts.

The storm moves to the next ridge.

Listening, we wait.

~~

--PL