Claire Millikin – Poetry

In Claire Millikin’s poem “Of Angels,” beyond the personal, there is a broader narrative of relationships, of destruction, of the difficulty in our time of distinguishing truth and fiction, angels and devils, kindness and abuse, and what is happening to our climate. What our icons are and what they mean is now not so clear. What we thought we knew is thrown into question, the straight climb up that spiritual ladder is fraught with dangers from within and without. “We don’t allow heaven to enter us without pain,” the speaker says, and then she ends on the notion of a question she can’t bring herself to frame, which feels so much like our situation right now—what do we even ask about the current mayhem and cruelty?

“Framer’s Shop” continues the meditation, more pointedly on time and change: what can be framed and what remains beyond or outside all our categories, our boundaries?  For all that can’t be put into frames, still we want an afternoon, a gate, a time somehow stopped and held, even as its image is also elegy to the event. As Millikin says, “what is becomes what was,” and so when we hinge an image to the wall, are we looking simultaneously at what is and what was?  How this resonates with our current situation as we watch what currently is destroy so much of what we thought was.

Betsy Sholl MAJ editor

Claire Millikin is the author of ten books of poetry, including Magicicada an Independent Book Award Distinguished Favorite (2025). Millikin teaches for the University of Maine system, and lives in coastal Maine.

 

Of Angels

 

On the icon of Saint John Climacus, angels climb the ladder

and some are falling, yanked by winged devils—

I think of the icon, lambent and vestal, these days

because my mother is falling and my father is falling,

and I used to call them from phone booths

back when phone booths existed

and I’d tell them I was homeless

and they’d comfort me

The street’s not a bad place to live!

they’d say, why don’t you find some guy, get married.

 

Rain’s falling fast today—a heavy harvest,

wounded fields of sky—and angels in the icon are climbing

and some are also flying

but the devils are also flying

and they can catch the angels.

It’s not hard for them.

 

So the therapist says your sisters bonded

empathetically with the abuser

meaning they became as cruel as my father

and I’m left trying again to save my mother

who will never be saved.

 

The angels yank her down. Or are they devils?

In the icon you really cannot tell.

Heft of rain, or maybe it’s just my sisters’ remembered heartbeats

that once were close to mine in our childhood bed.

 

I return in my mind to the icon.

It’s raining harder because of global warming.

More reason to trust the devils

will pull down the angels.

That’s what Saint John Climacus meant

about how hard it is to humanly climb—

the angels have human bodies

and also the devils and we don’t

allow heaven to enter us without pain.

 

I’d call my parents from the street’s endless hallway

even now, still waiting for an answer

to a question I cannot bring myself to frame.

 

 

Framer’s Shop

 

Carry the pictures to be framed.

Say there was a beginning

 

and now an end and we don’t want

it to end but weather is solemn

 

and no one escapes the weather

no matter how deep we walk into our houses.

 

Bring to the framer’s shop the poster

of the college gate the child walked through

 

becoming a man, and the photograph

of graduation, and the print of a painting

 

loved in a museum in someone else’s city

some quiet afternoon in another December.

 

So much cannot be put in frames—the turn

of that street in childhood, my own alone

 

cut with winter light. The framer accepts

only real objects, photographs, prints, diplomas, to set them

 

as what is becomes what was. Or is it the other way around?

Delicate inlet, we pay the framer to frame it—

 

lay a boundary across time that spends us

since light is so wide. On the backstair landing windowsill

 

a dragonfly died this summer, and no one

has yet cleaned it away. Maybe I’m the only one

 

who sees it, fragile skeleton held in light,

I’m afraid to touch the almost weightless

 

wreckage of its life. So it stays. Balanced,

if the image were eternal, on a subtle shelf.

 

Place the framed photographs on the mantel.

Hammer nails and hinge art to the wall

 

so the house is not silent in itself.

Heft of the day’s unsimple pull

 

don’t feel so sad about it! everyone says, just

a door we’re always passing through.