Wayne Miller, The End of Childhood

 

AMERICAN DOMESTIC

The drone was ours
Slipping home
Toward a distant strip of earth
That was also America

While the operator
Stared into his net of pixels
Then stepped down
From the consequence of the mission
Into the dark grass

Drove the long way
Through the night air
He had to cut
With the blade of his headlights

His family waiting
Behind the heavy curtains
Of that home he’d carried with him
To work and back
As most of us do

Home that fell away
At the required moment
So he could get on with it
What do we say

When he opens the front door
And that bright interior
Flashes suddenly
Into the world

Denver, Colorado poet and editor Wayne Miller’s sixth full-length poetry collection, most recently following We the Jury (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here] is The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025), a collection that continues his lyric explorations at the collision between the dark realities of American military culture and the intimacies of home, family and childhood. “My best friend’s older brother had posters // of nuclear explosions all over his bedroom.” he writes, as part of the poem “THE LATE COLD WAR,” “At night they became the walls of his sleep.” There’s a sharpness to his lyrics, his lyric turns, able to change course mid-thought, allowing the collision of ideas or troubling connections.

The End of Childhood is a title, of course, that provides layers of possibility, from the complicated and naturally-human simplicity of emerging out of childhood thinking, from discovering that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist, to the realization of the failings of trusted adults, into further shades of darkness of human possibility. These are poems on multiple levels of realization, and a broadening scope. “Last week, a violent mob / of thousands stormed the Capital. // They wore sweatpants and flags,” begins the second part of his three-part “ON HISTORY,” “puffer coats and tactical gear. // If I ignore the details of their chants / and the silliness of their face paint, // they become a historical form. / That policeman on the television // being crushed in a doorway / over and over is trapped inside // of history. If you feel nothing / for him, then you are inhuman. // Yet all of us were pushing / from one side or another.” His title allows for a further suggestion of innocence, in thinking that such could not happen, could no longer happen; could not happen here. Through his articulations, Miller knows full well that he and all around him live deep within history, from the best moments through to the worst. The storming of the Capital Building, or a teenager felled by a bullet while waiting for the bus. These are poems that meet the present moment, even amid the intimacies of home and memory, children and those recollections of childhood that becoming a parent can so often prompt.

While, for the most part, these troubling elements of “America” sit at the background, almost as a shroud, they are still deeply present, even as the book as a whole writes around childhood, from his to that of his children, offering moments that stitch together that accumulate into narratives with the lightest touch across lines, one phrase carefully set upon another. Whatever the subject matter, there is such a lovely slowness to his lines, a deliberateness, offering hush and a halt amid such careful measure. “My grandfather—just a boy— / discovered his father’s body,” Miller writes, as part of “ON VIOLENCE,” “the trauma of which is why, / my grandmother would say, // he never aspired to more / than basic, menial work. // My grandmother’s father / drowned in Sheepshead Bay // after a night of heavy drinking / with the fishermen // he so admired. Foul play / was suspected, but never proved. // This was in 1920. Back then, / my grandmother told me, // things like that happened / all the time.”

Miller is remarkably good at offering poems that hold tight against the lyric, meeting the breath of a moment or a packed thought, nearly into the realm of the koan, one set against each other as a series of steps. The opening section, “TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY,” holds even closer to that lyric ethos, a sequence of more than forty self-contained short bursts, two to a page, each of which hold a thought that itself leads into a question. The poem “ZOO,” for example: “The plexiglass / separating us from the animals // brings them closer [.]” Or the opening piece, “CHILDREN,” that reads: “Condemned to live // inside the weather / of our moods [.]”