who looks like me.
These are the terrors of the present. The old-fashioned American nightmares of racial persecution are reserved for Miller's historical poems. Old bad news and new bad news converge in "Rosa Parks dreams," in which the activist dreams of a bus -- not from Jim Crow America, but war-torn Jerusalem:
A headless
woman sits in her seat. There is no
driver today. The top of the bus
is missing.
The disconnected logic of dreams makes perfect sense of a landscape in which anything could destruct at any time. It's enough to make a person, or a poet, want to crawl into bed and stay there, with or without the extremely good fortune of making love. •
Chris King is editorial director of the St. Louis American.
