Tirana is a heavy
disc of silence
slipped between
the mountains and the sea.
Beneath that
silence:
thumbing car
horns,
particles of
language sailing on the air.
In the towering trees
above the Lana
River, a cloud
of chirping so
dense its outline
can almost be
traced in the waxy green.
The children in
the schoolyard
are a wellspring
of sound,
and in the museum
a swallow caught
in the upper gallery
pulls circles
around the room
as if on a string.
What else?
The muezzin’s call
is light glinting
off a needle. What else?
Inside the
chessbox of this poem,
old men are
walking arm-in-arm
across a square,
the medieval castle
has grown luminous
with shopping.
What else?
The city has
slipped again beneath itself.
What else? A
travel poem
is like a
discharged patient
recalling the days
he spent with nurses—
their voices that
brushed
against him for
simple things,
having covered
such a distance
just to cross the
room.
Wayne Miller is the author of five poetry collections, most recently We the Jury (Milkweed, 2021) and Post- (2016), which won the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, and edits Copper Nickel.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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