"The Art of Dying" • George Harrison (by David P. Miller)

                                                  Are you still with me? (George Harrison, “The Art of Dying”)

a) artichoke sugar bowl

b) stacked circular storage boxes

c) four square coasters

d) ceramic salt and pepper shakers

e) clothbound book

                                                                     &

a) sugar bowl shaped like an artichoke with butterfly on the lid

b) magenta plastic box on top of larger box in deep-gold metal

c) coasters     one ceramic    three plasticized on cork

d) ivory-hued salt and pepper shakers with pictures of animals

e) off-white clothbound book in transparent plastic slipcover

                                                                     &

a) Artichoke sugar bowl with two tiers of leaves on the bowl itself, three on the lid. The handle, a butterfly with half-opened wings.

b) The magenta plastic box’s lid looks like a button with four thread holes. The metal box’s lid highlights a red heart on heavy blue paper.

c) The ceramic coaster reads CALLE LUNA, brown letters on white. The others: stained-glass-like image of a frog, two butterflies, the word Panamá; photograph of Thoreau’s headstone; photograph of sculpture surrounded by an illuminated fountain.

d) Squirrel on salt shaker, jackrabbit on pepper shaker, both facing right.

e) Clothbound book propped on my crumpled napkin. On the cover, four names, each with image of a card deck suit.

                                                                     &

c) Ceramic coaster from San Juan in the style of a building-corner street sign.

a) Sugar bowl to the right. Gift from him to his wife. Its relief textures pleasure the fingertips, glossy in winter sunlight.

b) Magenta box to the right, perhaps intended for buttons but containing vitamins, atop a Cavendish & Harvey candy box also containing vitamins, with altered lid.

c) Coaster with frog and butterflies from her 60th-birthday Panama spree.

c) Coaster reminding the speaker of how anti-monumental Thoreau’s tiny stone sits at Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

d) Wordless shakers. Salt fills the squirrel shaker thanks to alliteration (given an absent “jackrabbit-pepper” chime).

e) The Four Suits, published 1965 by the avant-garde Something Else Press. The speaker was then a boy. Work by artists Allison Knowles, Tomas Schmit, Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner, each associated with a card suit. Angled on a cloth napkin, its cover reflects an image of the table lamp.

c) Cream-and-orange-toned coaster picturing the sculpture Bacchante and Infant Faun, nightlit in the Boston Public Library courtyard.

f) Poem fidgeting from third-person title (“the speaker”) to first-person possessive (“my”) and back (“him / his wife”). Are there then really two poems here?

If I turn in my chair to describe g) the shower stall in this same room, is shower-stall-in-kitchen a new premise best saved for poems the speaker has in fact already written?

Given that the speaker remembers h) a childhood prayer including “if I should die before I wake,” that awake again today he looks up from tabletop to photographs of his parents and in-laws, all deceased, squirrels as they dust snow from the fence, six metalcraft hearts cascading down the window frame,

then what is the poem’s i) emotional position?

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations, and have appeared in Meat for Tea, Lily Poetry Review, Reed Magazine, About Place Journal, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, SurVision, Vincent Brothers Review, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in an issue of Magma (UK) focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He is a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets.