Somewhere During the Spin Cycle
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Somewhere During the Spin Cycle

Maybe it's the ball player being interviewed
on the t.v. bolted to the back wall
or the two kids playing and punching
the video machine
or the late night October wind,
but there's your brother,
drunk and crying,
running through the woods
behind your house,
his unclipped duffel
spilling clothes behind him,
and your father
sitting in the kitchen,
shirtless, gaunt,
his clenched face
watching
as we search for a flashlight
to follow the trail
of socks and t-shirts
back to the overgrown diamond
where Ted is passed out
in deep right field
and we sit between second and third,
smoking the pack of Marlboros
your sister bought for us,
folding clothes,
and talking about where we will go
when we're his age.

This is a great poetry of the blues--with their ordinary events and days played against the shock of grace. In Mills' poetry, simple, enormous things (a wife's hand touching the speaker as he sleeps, the torque of memory erupting through scents and voices) all hold a bright real light against the grating presence of death and dissolution. It is purely original, and (like the poet describing memory through a vintage of wine) has notes of Charles Wright and Pablo Neruda in its own particular savor.

- Jan Van Stavern

In a voice both rueful and companionable, Joe Mills inscribes through

these poems the wavering circle of everyday life, the center of which is

everywhere and the circumference nowhere -- exactly the radius of the human

heart.

- John P. O'Grady
Copyright . Joseph Mills. All rights reserved.
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