The Country

In the distance, stick shift and rumble seat,
the hiss from my father’s lips passing
for a laugh, a Sunday drive, soldiers
back from the big war, hitchhike
in their uniforms, 1946. Mother throws
them kisses, waves, all those brave boys,
their duffle bags beside them like sleeping
heaps of dreams, on the side of the road.
I knew nothing of the bomb, other
than a picture in Life of a mushroom
cloud and its vast unfurling. The news
took so long to reach us, radios slow
to warm up, their thin signals, songs
etched in memory, images pressed in tin,
Mother and Father singing, They asked me
if I knew our true love was true,
and I, from the back seat, I, then of course
replied, when a sleeping flame dies, smoke
gets in your eyes. Just once, all of us together
singing, driving east toward the country
and the sun, away from Brooklyn, to the house
that would become our home, four flowering
Linden trees, a sunken garden, and so many roses—
American Beauties climbing
the flagstone walls.

Praise for The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself

In his heart-wrenching poem “Lies,” Miles Coon writes: “In the loam of all I know / but don’t know I know / I dig.” And how I love what Miles Coons reveals with this digging. With a wise awareness of the power of language, and with an intimate and most singular voice, Coon’s poems show unfailing emotional courage and profound intelligence of the heart. His poems astonish—sometimes with their delightful humor and unique irony, or with haunting and poignant images—but always, unfailingly, with remarkable clarity. This is an honest book. A book you’ll want to keep close, like a trusted and necessary friend—vulnerable, attentive, witty, consoling, and, above all, deeply human.

—Laure-Anne Bosselaar, author of These Many Rooms

In his debut collection, Miles Coon chronicles the silences and shouts learned from family to the love that led to a new genesis. Through griefs both personal and national, Coon’s poems range through identity and exclusion to poems of labor and coming-of-age. These poems contain generations and look at the legacy of parents and children in all its loving and messy complexity. It is a triumph of understanding who we come from, what both hearts and bodies need, and the discovery of a voice that can speak about the wounds and their healing. 

—Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod 

With this book, The Quotient of My Self Divided by Myself, Miles Coon has given us an unflinching portrait of a demanding life. In many ways, it is like a symphony in three movements, three sections, each carrying a weave of contrasting themes—some melodic, some painfully dissonant. I find it especially helpful when a book allows an intricate look at someone’s story, because each life is an emblem of every life. These poems invite the reader to rethink the sum total of his/her time in the world, to see clearly how vulnerable we’ve all been to the emotional complexity of family and to the imperatives of the society to which we were born. Perhaps such poems make it possible to forgive (and applaud) ourselves as well as the people who paved the roads we’ve been obliged to walk.

—Tim Seibles, author of One Turn Around the Sun

Miles A. Coon resides in Palm Beach, Florida, with Mimi, his wife of more than fifty years. He received an M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002 after having spent thirty years in a manufacturing business. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, class of 1962, and the University of Virginia, with highest honors, class of 1959, where he studied Philosophy and Economics. His poems have appeared widely, and his chapbook, Homeland Security, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2005. Miles is a supporter of many non-profit poetry organizations and independent presses. He is a self-described “workshop junkie,” having participated in well over fifty of them. Miles founded the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2005 and served as its President and Chairman of the Board until 2022. (Note: Miles died on May 21, 2022, just days before the publication of his first book-length collection of poems.)