Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 126

MODERN AGE

SUMMER 2016

That on his ears might well have been
The fossil calls of ancient birds
That only mockingbirds remember.

The boy may be seen as a figure of the poet listening back through
time toward time's beginnings.
In "The Basket Weaver's Dream," Mills enters the mind of a
young boy weaving baskets in an orphanage. The sound of the
boy's departed or dead mother brushing tangles from her hair
blends with the woven "basket splinters" and these in turn with
his dream of "the trees / Of Paradise," trees on which hanging
moss reminds him of his mother's hair. And through these trees
a breeze blows, an elemental wind-perhaps the ruach-the
source of the ancient fossil music another boy long afterward
would hear in mockingbirds' songs. The poem closes with the
weaving together of these various strands of metaphor as the
boy, now a man, attends carefully to his work:
We've seen him often, crouching over,
Almost listening to the grain.
And if you ask him what he hears,
He'll stroke his beard and talk about
A lost significance of wood;
He'll lean and whisper in your ear
About a breeze in the trees of Eden.

Section 2, from Arriving on Time, is the first of three sections taken
from various selections and orderings of Mills's later poems. Some
of these poems are set on the Gulf coast, including Grand Isle,
Louisiana, where the Mills family had a house.
126

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Modern Age - Summer 2016

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