Y

by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Perhaps it’s a thread that needs to be pulled,
a single stitch caught in the crux.

Whole word in French and Spanish,
vertical axis of Cartesian three

loaning its fragile branch to a boy
in theory.  On y va.  Let’s go There.
 
What happens to unrepaired sequences
in subsequent generations?  Semivowel,

blown umbrella, arrow reversed in wind,
frizzy blot of genetic code directing the symphony

of a trillion sperm, a single Y. . .might fold over,
line up these similar patches of genetic sequence,
 
and then accidentally delete everything
that lies in between.  Je est un autre.

If the face is a christening in flesh,
the boy of him is its opposite,

raising the tent of bones in which
he will harbor all the starry anomalies

that a knowledge of God cannot undo.

***

Leslie Adrienne Miller is author of six collections of poetry including Y, The Resurrection Trade and Eat Quite Everything You See from Graywolf Press, and Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Professor of English at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an M.A. from the University of Missouri, and a B.A. from Stephens College.

http://leslieadriennemillerpoet.com/

 

© The Antioch Review 2015