Joe Mills

HOW YOU KNOW

How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The difficulty
with love, I want to say, is sometimes
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived
or left. Love is the elephant and we
are the blind mice unable to understand
the whole. I want to say love is this
desire to help even when I know I can’t,
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars,
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes,
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things
she has asked about over the years, all
those phenomena whose daily existence
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head.
I don’t even know how to match my socks.
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says,
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

Joe Mills

CONVERSATION

Daddy, what are these?
my three year old daughter asks,
pointing to the car grill
and the dozens of insects
we have smashed
while driving around.

I want to say “spots”
or “nothing” or
“I don’t know.”
I want to put off discussions
like this until she’s older
or at least with her mother,
but I know I can’t.

Bugs, I say, Just bugs.

      Why are they there?

We hit them.

She knows this is bad;
a boy down the street
was hit by a car
and taken away
in an ambulance.

     Should we take them
     to the hospital?

No. They’re dead.

We carry the bags
into the house
and unload the groceries.
Later, after dinner
and the evening bath,
we work on a puzzle,
and as she tries
to figure out
how the sky
fits together,
she says
without turning around

     They don’t want to be dead,
     do they?

No, I say, No, they don’t.

—from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Joe Mills

ON ATTENDING A HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION

—from Rattle 29, Summer 2008

__________

Joe Mills: “In college, I signed up for a poetry workshop because it was in the afternoon. For the first assignments, I wrote lines like, ‘Spring flowers raise their sleepy heads / to smell the dewy freshness.’ One day the professor commented that he didn’t know why he was bothering since none of us would write past the age of 25. In my twenties, I was writing to prove him wrong. In my 40s, I’m writing to give my thoughts and life shape.”