At that age, I wondered about
God’s last name
and why swinging high
made your stomach drop
and why that felt so good.
And about the edge of the universe.
If everything has an edge, I reasoned,
Then out there, beyond the moon,
beyond the galaxies,
there must be plywood joists,
propping up the scenery
at the edge of everything.
Beyond that backdrop,
the scent of fresh-cut wood,
plain floor littered with
sawdust and crumpled gum wrappers
and beyond that—
This was how I learned my mind
could feel like swinging high.
Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems
beyond
Burn
Burn for Now—
All these plans built
With dollars and curtains,
Chicken dinners and sensible cars,
Changing light bulbs, going to a job—
Burn.
The ghosts hidden in old photo
Albums, jewelry boxes, dishes
In your cupboard,
And that invisible future
Painted on the inside of your forehead—
Burn that, too.
Burn the whole house of yourself.
Stand still in the charred doorway
All that’s left of your proud life.
Rubble of all that didn’t work out.
Leave these smoldering ruins
Step forward.
Feel how light
When there’s nothing left to
Burn.
I Am
taller than I pictured
and sudden as the spearmint
growing wild at the edge
of this careful garden.
I am strolling up to the door
of my next life,
the third date with myself,
after
I’ve charmed myself
as best I can,
smiled as I wove my story
kept my baggage
mismatched and colorful.
I’ve tilted my head and studied
my future over candlelit dinners
trying to picture us together
as I describe to myself
the shape of dreams I’ve gathered
herding them back each time they wander
shutting them in the yard till now,
the third date,
the one where I go all the way.
Express Poem
Even in darkness
or hidden by a curve
there are vibrations
before it appears,
barreling towards
me, waiting small
and scared, shivering
in the glare
from the headlights,
wishing for someone
else to save me,
sure I’m not fit for the job.
Here they come–
Headlights of the express
train bearing down on me
here,
where I’ve tied
myself to the tracks.
Impossible Poems
The birds inside the airport
Flying at the windows, trapped,
Starving for sky.
The ruined marriage,
Stained and crumpled, shoved
To the darkness at the back
Of the drawer you won’t open
Because there are all those sharp edges.
The way that every year
It’s the same dreary gray rain
That cracks open the world
Till it blossoms.
Infestation of Ladybugs
Ladybug, maybe
because you’re bright red
or it could be the polka-dots–
It’s like an infestation of something round
and cheerful—
turtles, or raspberries.
Or maybe it’s that you’re such an April insect,
inspiring nearly everyone to recite poetry
about the big subjects: Fiery disaster,
Children leaving home,
Your plucky effort to save that one child,
the youngest, of course,
who, God know why,
hid beneath the pudding pan.
Maybe it’s because of that story
I consider you kindly,
think you so harmless.
You seem so old-fashioned then–
to even have a pudding pan
much less a child beneath it.
Just Like Trees
Rain fell for days, stopped.
This is goodbye,
bare trees like matchsticks
waiting for a flame.
Soon, you’ll burst into
new green, fuzzed like the babies
in your nested branches.
Together may you open, bloom,
take to the air.
Broken Home
For the month of April, to mark International Poetry Month, I’m trying to write a daily poem in response to someone else’ s prompt instead of writing about whatever wanders into my head that day. It’s hard, weird, and interesting, all at once. The prompts I’m using are posted by Robert Brewer on his inspiring blog, Poetic Asides. Today’s prompt: write a broke poem.
I let everything in our house
Stay broken for you.
I left everything
In our house
Broken
For you
Now that you’re gone,
Slowly,
Like springtime arrives this year,
Broken latches,
Broken railings,
Broken chairs,
Are cured.
I fix them
Then
Make dinner
Make a poem
Make a home.
In Case Of…
It was an old wooden box, with no key. She found it at a yard sale in a small town fifty miles away and paid too much for it. Back home, she placed it on the kitchen table and smashed the lock off to see what the box held.
Inside were bits of paper, handwritten, full of advice, contingency plans, exit maneuvers. She sorted them into piles, dividing them by types of paper. Each kind of paper, she soon discovered, had its own flavor of advice.
There were blue squares, with roosters in the corner, shopping lists on one side: apples, milk, roasts, white bread. On the back of the lists, in the same flowing script, motherly advice: In case of rain, unexpected company, wrinkled linens. Another stack: Blue-lined notebook paper in childish handwriting, shaky Palmer script advising her what to do in case of lost homework, bullies, bad lunches. There were index cards with neat, blocky printing and instructions on what to do in case of problems with furnaces, rain gutters, flat tires.
Finally, at the bottom of the box, a few strips of thick, cream colored paper. Some with no words at all, only tiny sketches of trees and flowers that had never grown in this world. The advice, if there was any, tended towards what to do in case of infestations of fairies, how to manage elves who came to visit and wouldn’t go home, plans in case of dragons. The very last slip of paper said, In case you are lost….with a hand-drawn map on the back.
At last. She nearly cried with relief. Practical advice, at last.
Suffering
Rich language
stumbles at the same word
describing
injured soldiers, slaughterhouses,
refugees, cancer patients,
Lincoln’s face, toddler tantrums,
boredom, thirst.
No glibness.
I want to invent words to show
the vastness of the oceans between.
Instead, you show me
a map of the universe
where all our suffering
Human, animal, planet
is so small,
disappearing
in all this night sky.
