Limping Along
Even as we march forth into the future, we can’t stop wrestling with the past. Three poems about what time whispers in our ears.
MARCHING FOURTH
As the bong got passed around,
my housemate pointed out,
“This is the only day
that’s a command,”
which seemed profound
as most things did
at those moments,
and then he did a pompous walk
around the kitchen
and we laughed as we did
at most things in those moments.
Decades later, I ask my children
“Do you know what day it is?”
then answer, “March Fourth!”
and parade step around
as they groan at the Dad joke.
They return to eating,
and I think of how I learned
the joke from an old friend
who has children of his own now
and Parkinson’s,
both of us transformed
from stoner lost boys to soccer dads,
that stereotypical joke
Time delights in telling
as it marches forth,
the one stupid and profound.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Some sounds would seem to have gone extinct,
the latch clank of your grandparents’ 1940s fridge,
the scratch of a Red Devil match to light a pipe,
the backfiring of your uncle’s Chevy station wagon,
the pumping to prime an old Coleman camping stove,
the rotary dial of a phone, a dial up modem connecting,
the woompfs as someone flips through albums quickly
like an experienced secretary at a filing cabinet,
then you discover a store with large bins of records
and, inside the door, you stop, close your eyes, and
listen to the sound of people browsing through jackets,
a collective whisper of searching, desire, and longing,
one you would put on your Golden Record to send out
to distant stars to give a sense of life on this planet.
Spin
A neighbor puts an old washer at the curb
with the handwritten note, “This one limps along.”
I think, “That could be on my year-end evaluations,”
and I remember the years of report cards that said,
“Joe needs to apply himself” or some version of
“I’m puzzled not to get better work from him.”
I think how useful it would be to have such notes
on name tags for meetings. They could say, “This one
kind of listens” or “This one came for the donuts
but still is open to learning something new.” If this
all sounds negative or mocking, I actually think,
“This one limps along” is a tribute. It still works
and it keeps going despite its age and deterioration.
Isn’t that the goal? That’s what this one tells myself.
About the author
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills has published many books, includingBodies in Motion: Poems About Dance and This Miraculous Turning, which was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. His latest poetry collection is The Holiday Cycle, published by Press 53.