Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SCREENING, by JANE MILLER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SCREENING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A society intent on living in the present tense
Last Line: Of moonlessness overlooking a sea?
Subject(s): Popular Culture - United States; Suburbs; Television; Tv


A society intent on living in the present tense
likes coming home and doing nothing, but turns on
Entertainment Tonight as a form of literalness,
like seeing someone for the first time
in a photograph, staring at the thing and knowing
our future to be tied to it, shocking, hard to imagine,
hysterically seductive. We don't want to kiss it
or give it a hug, but its presence is purposeful, like a tribe
whose history functions to call our relationships
into question. The situation lacks urgency, yet at the same time
what's public is always so real. We don't therefore have to take
my word for it, we can think of ourselves

as an audience and know all the same we're a view
lit by lightning whose life is imminent, a showcase
of stars just behind what is visible, nothing a small
commercial break can withhold forever.
For a whole moment our lives
are "state of the art," then a mini-transgression
floods in like a nice formal device, someone we bit
when we were a "couple" who now we remember as we rub
lotion on ourselves, home alone, in front of the TV
soaking strawberries in champagne. Relative newcomers
to this part of the country, we feel we can "catch up"
by monitoring the culture in general, seeing what

in particular is different about our new base. Mind you,
we have no intention of "seeing ourselves" in anyone,
but as we refer more and more to our condition as "the surface,"
we have a fear of needing that world, which weighs an amazing ton
and is therefore truer than any symbol, a blazing faceless
instant pressed, as it were, to our lips, threatening
because of our ability not to have to live it

in order to remember. Once you see it played, it's "yours,"
so to speak. This scares us, an everpresent reminder
of limits, a physically perfect world gone to splinter.
The kind of thing that "turns heads" and "stops traffic,"
the model who knows he's gorgeous and can guarantee

he's never been in love, at least not the way we know
love, but rather is "from the place,"
and can infer the wind from the rain, from someone's hands
how long it's going to last, how someone's lips are going
to swell from the feeling really soon, this person
so devoted to self and life is beginning to be an audience
and in no way responsible. Personally speaking, we all
have a spirit that makes it easier to signal with a flame,
and we have a heart that makes it necessary for us to stop
for fresh cherries roadside, but beyond that,
we're indistinguishable from a world filled
to suffocating with "emotion." One touch is like another

as we see it, and the adjustment we made
back there is the one now seen as "perfect" for us then
and "perfect" for someone else now. In fact, we can see
someone doing what we did, watch it cost
what it cost then, we can embrace it fully as "ours," but are we
seeing ourselves or the thing we've made of ourselves,
and are we the same? We say it's getting light out
but cannot say it's late. We seem to be saving
for years for a rug at the foot of the bed, planting the last
marjoram on a balcony in California, but are we enjoying
a false immortality of imagery, the splendor
of moonlessness overlooking a sea?





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