April 2015
When I joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I was only planning on staying a few years. That was over fifteen years ago. In fact, the sentiment “that wasn’t what I expected to happen” is probably at the core of most of my work. I’ve published five collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently This Miraculous Turning. Every New Year’s Eve I resolve to improve my guitar playing and learn how to cook more interesting dishes; the fact that each year I genuinely believe this will happen reveals a fundamentally optimistic nature. My website: www.josephrobertmills.com
Through This School
Every August, the principal gives
the same speech to the families
stacked on the gym bleachers.
Through this school comes our future,
senators, mayors, doctors, and lawyers.
He doesn’t mention through the school
also comes future plumbers, nurses,
and custodians, and there’s not a word
about the future thieves, deadbeats,
and arsonists, or that some of the ones
who go through do so with difficulty,
blocking the way like kidney stones
until they’re painfully passed. No one
points out a manager at McDonalds
or DMV clerk could say the same.
We go through the doors and halls
together then tell ourselves that we
we take the roads less travelled by.
But that speech comes later. In June.
In August, the parents sit, listening
and fantasizing one day their kids
will be mentioned as famous alumni
while, next to them, the children
wait, with varying degrees of patience,
knowing this isn’t really about them,
but eager to pass through towards
the unspeakable future that will be.
From Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet (Press 53, 2012).
Standing Before Shelves of Cookbooks
and Trying to Decide What to Make for Dinner
Most of these I’ve never used,
although each time I bought one
I was convinced that I would,
just as I thought I would read
the pile of parenting books
that now spills under the bed,
or the texts on physics,
stars, and string theory
stacked next to my desk.
I used to check out hundreds
of library books, hoping somewhere
in the pages would be the advice
I needed to make something
with the ingredients of my life,
yet each day ends up being
another hasty improvisation
with nothing measured cleanly
and no clear sequence to the steps.
Still, I continue to believe
in the idea of simple solutions,
ones as elegant as a wheel.
I remember how someone said
the best Italian dishes have no more
than four ingredients with the key
being freshness and quality,
how Archimedes claimed he could
move the world with a long enough lever
and a solid place to stand,
how the most powerful sentence
in the Bible is “Jesus wept.”
So later, after dinner, whatever it is,
I will navigate the dark bedrooms
of my children, threading past
piles of books, toys, and clothes,
until I stand before them,
the daughter and the son,
each asleep, wrapped in sheets
like loaves of fresh bread,
and I will murmur a kind of prayer:
May you recognize the wheel
of your days. May your faith
and friendships be flavored
with tears May you find love
like a lever and a place to stand
together. May you have a life as
satisfying as a good Italian dish.
From Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet (Press 53, 2012).
©2015 Joseph Mills