by Robert Miltner
CITY OF SALT
FOLLOW THE BURNING INSIDE your sinuses, nostrils, throat. Walk
the rue of lamentation that stings like bitter sugar. It is a city constructed
on evaporated estuaries by sailors, mariners, seafarers, seadogs. You will
know it by its three sodium pillars. The scent is like chloride from glazed
fjords of the crystalline north. You will know it by its brackish script
written on paper blotters dissolving in the lost arroyos. You will know it
as salt flat without fault lines, as black ice gleam in summer heat. Hear
the song of the pinch, the grain, the saline drop. You will know it as a
blanched map in your hands. As briny geography sifting through your
softened fingers: road, rock, marsh, sea.
CANTATA
A glacier falls. A winter sky cracks. The air pressures. Not twang of bowstring.
Not screech of tectonic plates. Not blow-up of concrete towers. But heat and
weight. But cleave and crevice. But vibration and explosion. As ice shelves
moan. As waters rise. As coasts sink. Precipices cascade like reams of blank
pages covered in unwritten texts chronicling the moment of drowning.
Wind and sun ablate the ice, shelf to sheen to mirror to silver to pearl to frost
to white to breathless blue. As gravity leans on glaciers, they crack and calve,
quake and slump, collapse and plummet as if a building demolition. As tactile
thrum and aural thunder resonate and echo. Against the thin dome of artic
sky, the cataclysm is a cantata of glass, slivering.
ROBERT MILTNER’s collections of prose poetry include Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press/Many Voices Award) and Orpheus & Echo (Etruscan Press); his prose poetry chapbooks include Against the Simple (Kent State UP/Wick Chapbook Award), and Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions Chapbook Award); his collection of short fiction is And Your Bird Can Sing (Bottom Dog Press). He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry and was selected by Vermont Studio Center for an Ohio Arts Council Writing Residency. An emeritus professor of English at Kent State University and the NEOMFA, he edits The Raymond Carver Review.