He asked for help with the old book
falling apart in his hands.
The spine was gone.
Inside, leaves of pages stitched together.
Those neat stitches may hold forever,
but the pages are disintegrating
the words unraveling themselves from
this book, titled What A Woman Wants,
Unread
across the long decades.
Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems
Unread
Grace For The Commute
I listen to the NPR series
about commuting
on my morning commute
to savor the symmetry.
Today a mother spoke about
her three-hour commute
on a subway, with a toddler,
and the word she used
to describe this time was grateful.
I listened,
as I drove and the sun rose
over the hills and little lakes
of my morning commute,
red sky reflecting me,
ashamed of the petty griping
in my head, of my need to
be prodded, like a toddler,
reminded to say thank you,
to be grateful for this
overflowing world of wonder.
Peeling A Tangerine
I try to hurry the stubborn skin off
because there’s a poem I want
to write before I forget—
Every day, every minute,
there is so much to notice and
a poem is a tool, like a spoon,
made to scoop up a moment,
to slow and savor
to step outside
the rush of this world.
And I would, I would savor
if this stubborn peel
was off. Instead, it clings
and slows me down.
Holidays Take Their Toll
Like a toll road
you must pay to travel,
away and back again, or
like the wreath on our front door
built years ago by a little girl–
Apples, cut into circles, dried to
dark brown, glued onto Styrofoam
in overlapping rings.
The little girl is long grown,
but the wreath remains,
disintegrating year by year
as the holidays take their toll.
Now the Styrofoam shows at the edge
a clue to what holds everything together
despite the years and the wearing away.
Instructions For The Season
A found poem, composed from song titles in an old book of traditional Christmas carols.
Dame, get up and bake your pies
Now, light one thousand Christmas lights
Come, mad boys, be glad boys
O, come little children
O, come all ye faithful
Deck the halls
God bless the master of this house
While shepherds watch their flocks
Sleep, Little Jesus
Christmas Shadorma
I’d forgotten this Spanish form–remembered, gave it another try. Shadorma is a six-line form of counted syllables, divided as follows: 3/5/3/3/7/5. Go ahead, you try too–everyone has time for 26 syllables.
Colored lights
tacked along white walls
against night
help darkness
set itself on a new path:
To reflect and glow.
Gray Skies
Early, fields and trees and sky
all gray. Anchored by fresh snow
crevassed along the hills.
The world feels magical
as if everything is possible
and at peace.
Gray, in this moment,
is not the color of sadness
or of something worn out,
but the color of quiet–
the color of stillness
inside and out.
Rose Of The Prairie
Another story from NPR and Garrison Keillor that I can’t get out of my head.
The life you were born to
was a box you ran from
as fast and far as you could
and I hope you would laugh
at how this all turned out—-
that we love and romanticize
a gone world,
a world we hold dear,
Little houses on the prairie,
and in the big woods,
Ma and Pa,Laura, Mary, baby Carrie
a world we only know
because of you
who helped her
tell us all about it.
Puff Of Smoke Poems 