Joe Mills is a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Mills holds the endowed chair for the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities. His publications include four collections of poetry: Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet, Love and Other Collisions, Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers, and Somewhere During the Spin Cycle. He also has co-written two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries with his wife, Danielle Tarmey.---------
Savings
Last night we set the clocks back,
gaining an extra hour of sleep
or drinking or reading,
and I walked through the house
hunting for the time pieces
in the coffee maker, the stove,
the VCR, the thermostat,
the blinking numbers that surround us,
and then I went into the bathroom
to twist the scale
just a few pounds lighter
and I dialed the numbers down
on the blood pressure machine
so my wife won’t need as many pills,
then into the children’s room,
where I erased the doorframe marks
and repenciled them slightly lower,
not to the point we again needed
slings or strollers or could carry them
in our arms, just an inch or two,
to make these days last longer.
We’ve Had This Conversation Before
We’ve had this conversation before,
my daughter and I, many times,
about what she might buy
with her allowance, about candy,
about how her brother annoys her,
about where her birth mother might be,
and we’ve had this conversation before
my son and I, many times,
about how fast he is, how fast horses are,
about candy, about how his sister bosses him,
about how much a horse costs,
and we’ve had this conversation before,
my wife and I, many times,
about how tired we are,
about what we might buy them
and how much it all costs,
about how they annoy us, how fast,
they’re growing, how scared we are
about what might happen, about this life,
this life, so tiring and wonderful,
and how, if we could, we’d repeat it,
this life, many times,
many times.
The Girl in the Second Story Window
The window frames a young girl
combing her hair as she looks out
at the street or maybe at herself
in the glass’s reflection, and I’m sure,
for a moment, there was a Chinese poem
about this, written centuries ago,
but no, she’s talking on a cell phone,
flicking her hair, not seeing the wet trees,
the evening traffic, the stranger
walking home, who looks up,
for a moment, and thinks of Li Po,
and then a girl he knew in high school,
how they would talk on the phone
for hours, desperate for connection,
and who might be a mother now,
even a grandmother, or dead long ago.