Contributor’s Marginalia: Matthew Wimberley responding to Wayne Miller’s “Anchorage”

Perhaps because it is February, and because my father died twelve years ago this month that I read Wayne Miller’s “Anchorage” the way one might enter a quiet and secret place for the first time. The poem, a sonnet, opens against the loudness of breath, the speaker’s father snoring down the hall, and moves through a single moment of reverie and the wish to be both alone and seen.

Reading “to love him / and still want to be lifted from there” the line stretches in my mind, and I remember the last years of reconciliation and the long and boring drive out of the mountains to stay with my father in his apartment, where he always slept on the couch illuminated by a television’s pallid glow. I go back further, to a childhood marked by his absence and the nights I stayed up late, waiting for him to come home. It was before the divorce, and before I could articulate something true—that knowing someone loves you makes for the deepest hurting when they, when we, fail to show such love.

The house of Miller’s memory is brought to my mind like an Ed Hopper painting, one with the glass never painted in, the strangeness of the clarity there, of absence. And it is that feeling, the one of what is not there that I wander through: the father’s “new wife having left again for a hotel,” or another wish, “to want to leave and leave / no footprints.” In the memory of the poem, we are brought along to be both the speaker and the woman glancing from a window, to be the witness and the witnessed in such an intimate moment.

Here is another thing that’s true—the poem pushes against romanticizing and in doing so reminds me of the smallness of time, and how when I read this poem, I am hearing my father, still alive, snoring down the hall. As the poem concludes I go to the voice of the final lines:

                Child, you will be lifted

from that room; you can see yourself

          from every window.

The speaker makes clear that in poetry this can be said. There is an undercurrent here that perhaps because of my relationship to my father I read as cautionary, with a hesitation, with fear. But the tone of this poem, to me, has more to do with one quiet moment and a child’s love for a parent despite any unseen complications. That language can transform experience is one reason I come to a poem, and here I am left thinking on the prophetic voice at the end, the future tense colliding with the past. Anchorage is here both a real place and one imagined—and this house could be yours, could be mine—where we look out from one world into another, and wonder.