On the Interstate, my daughter tells me

she only has two questions.  I’m relieved

because she usually has two hundred.

I say, Okay, let’s have them, and she asks,

What was there before there was anything?

Stupidly, I think I can answer this:

There was grass, forests, fields, meadows, rivers.

She stops me.  No, Daddy.  I mean before

there was anything at all, what was there?

I say that I don’t know, so then she asks,

Where do we go when we die?  I tell her

I don’t know the answer to this either.

She looks out the side, and I look forward,

then she asks if we can have some music.

A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities.  He has published four collections of poetry with Press 53.  His fifth collection, This Miraculous Turning, will be released in September 2014.  More information about him is available at www.josephrobertmills.com, and he blogs regularly at www.josephrobertmills.blogspot.com.