Poem of the Week: Missing You by Miles Burroughs | hair

I missed you

Did you know that the moon was very old?
Might have to go home?

She keeps it close
The way old people do.

Goya wore candles on his hat
But Humphry Davy invented the miner’s lamp.

A day on Enceladus is longer than a year.
Tonight, we have the Spanish Civil War.

You can’t go on like this, moon
Looking into people’s bedrooms
And stars have their own lives to live.
When did you last think about the same chair? truly? He thinks!
You have to gather your strength, moon.
You say you remember things.
What can you remember?
It’s embarrassing. You think you’re fine.
Just yesterday I put rice crackers in the fridge.

What will happen next?
If your hand shakes, sit on it. Wipe your mouth.
Skating around. When did you get a decent job?

Your voice sounds like a nervous cough.
You have to pull yourself together
And close the door if you can’t sing in tune.

Your eyes look like catacombs
And make me think of furnished rooms.

We’ve heard enough about my grandfather’s work in Leeds.
Your eyes look like abandoned beliefs.

Miles Burroughs, born in Leicester in 1936, published his first collection with Cape when he was about thirty years old. In the following decades, he worked in various countries and practiced medicine before his most subversive career was celebrated with Carcanet’s 2017 publication of Waiting for the Nightingale. It was followed by a collected poems, Take Us Little Foxes, in 2021.

This week’s poem, “Missing You,” is from Burroughs’s latest volume, “The Slow Hole.” It is linked to one of the new poems in the collection, Protesting with the Moon, which has now been expanded with additional “characters” and a focus on the sheer brutality of Western social attitudes to aging. Like much of Burroughs’s work, which is important for the pleasure of engaging with it, he presents readers with a strange but far-from-reality theatrical spectacle that he insists we view in our imagination.

“Missing You” seems to bring together a family meeting about “what to do” about a very old relative, who is cruelly and comically imagined as both the moon and the person. When the lights come on, one character whispers in a booming voice to another “Did you know the moon was so old / Maybe he should go home?” The moon person, on stage (it’s fun to imagine the costume and antics), represents impersonality, and it can be assumed that he did not hear those words. As the title of the poem suggests, there is a “missing” you, as well as a missing “you.”

In the second stanza I imagine a second voice, raised in support of the first, just to expose ignorance of the lunar truth. The lunar person is imagined to be “approaching himself / the way old people do.” However, the actual Moon is increasing its distance from Earth every year. I would go further in the dramatization, and suggest that the Moon person be given a speaking role in the next two stanzas, piecing together random facts, as if recalling some important information from his specialty, illumination. Art, science, and one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, are briefly illuminated by cheerful non-sequiturs.

Missing You is a microcosm of one of Burroughs’ favorite tools: the joke and its deconstruction. The Moon-person’s listed failings include the Moon’s innocent habit of “peering into people’s bedrooms” and the harmless practice of storing “rice crackers” in the refrigerator. But the fun dissipates, and there is a steadily growing impatience and anger. This phase of the poem can be expressed as a Greek chorus of unanimous disapproval.

The process of intense recharacterization leads to the dismantling of romantic or romantically decadent moons of poetry. This moon is becoming increasingly recognizable as an elderly humanoid, characterized by forgetfulness, hand tremors, a “hopping” habit, and a sound “like a nervous cough”. Polite concealment is urgently needed. Meanwhile, the moon person began to sing horribly, intending to drown out the repeated commands to “pull yourself together.” Perhaps she began to feel strangely liberated by the fragmentation of her identity, the exposure of limitless antisocial potential.

Her face at the end of the poem reminded me faintly of Sylvia Plath’s moon pictures in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” Burroughs amplifies the bleakness of the cold bones, an effect created by the similes themselves, and the repetition of the end rhymes: “Your eyes are like catacombs / And make me think of furnished rooms.” “Catacombs” and “Furnished Rooms” evoke the mismatch and association between the echo of emptiness and suffocating chaos; Both indicate the extremes of human isolation and invisibility. Most of us, if we are like the middle-class characters in Burroughs’s satirical novel, will leave behind furnished rooms when we die.

Not all the humor has been exhausted yet. The first line of the final stanza is funny, because “Grandfather’s business in Leeds” still rhymes with the strangeness of Moon who is also a person—a person proud, it seems, of his working-class roots. But the return in the last line to the eyes of “like abandoned doctrines” is frankly bleak. He seems to be echoing the reference to the Spanish Civil War (line 8), which, according to Enceladus’s modified calendar, the speaker has now decided will happen: “Tonight we have the Spanish Civil War.” The kin wage war on the lunar person, but they are also lunar people, their dreams and beliefs fleeting, betrayed by neglect of inevitable death.

If Missing You sometimes sinks into rage and gloom, Slow Puncher is a happy reminder of what Burrows’ talent for satire and rare self-mockery deploys. He can be heard introducing himself in unparalleled form and reading from his collected poems here.