When you say, Take it with a grain of salt,
a round little man walks into my mind
wearing chef’s whites and carrying a serving tray.
From a delicate green bowl,
he lifts one single grain of coarse salt
between his finger and thumb.
Pierre—yes, I’ve named him
by now—Pierre steps forward and bows
as he hands me one more grain
to add to the mountains of advice
I’ve already been given.
Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems
Pierre, Who Lives Inside A Cliche
Interruption of Lemons
Yesterday was a tangled knot
of interruptions,
of bodies standing in front of me
all saying Pay Attention to Me now.
So I did the practical thing,
in the face of all that need:
Chopped myself into a million jigsaw pieces,
handed a bit to each earnest face,
saying, This is all I can spare now, but
come back tomorrow for more.
Oh, it tastes like lemon sugar,
I heard one of them say as they left.
Even now, I feel a tug of affection
for who I was–puzzle woman, smiling and
making sure
as she handed out
delicious pieces of herself,
to hang on to the lemon-scented core
for keeps.
Transformation
Inside our houses
heat has dried us out,
parched our skin white–
the houseplants curl
in on themselves,
dreaming of deserts.
Outside our storm doors
the world shifts beneath
its frozen weight, deep
in its own dreams.
Step outside.
This whole world
only needs
a tiny cup of your heat
to melt it into
what winter’s old stories
prophesied–
even the thickest ice
can become
a soft summer rain.
American Sentences: February
I.
Sky spits snow I wave away, tired of the same old conversation.
II.
Patch of snow melt shows sweet brown dirt, where old sage bush whispers—Garden, grow.
Tillie’s Gone to Texas
Sounds like a lonesome country song
about a cowboy crying in his beer
over the fickle girl who left–
blond curls and an old Ford truck
rattling down the highway
and out of his heart.
She let her apron
catch the breeze and blow away
so now you’ll have to cook
for yourself, cornbread that will
never taste the same,
which brings the chorus back to you,
there on your barstool, all alone.
It makes me almost sad
to remind myself that
Tillie’s gone to Texas
was what the neighbor said
when I asked about his funny dog
who used to keep me company on walks.
But he promised
she’ll be back come spring
unlike your Tillie, cowboy,
who is gone for good.
American Sentences: After the Valentine
American Sentences is a switched-up version of haiku invented by Allan Ginsberg. He defined it as one single 17-syllable sentence instead of the 5-7-5 syllable, three-line format in other American interpretations of Japanese haiku.
Valentine’s Day over, time to take down paper roses from the door,
and past time to put away that basket of glittered pink hearts you kept.
Sweep the floor, and open into shamrocks with the wide green spring ahead.
Be True To This
When you stumble into a poem,
life—your life—is suddenly
Lit Up. Exactly what it was—
only the angle
shifts, and tumbles you
into a brand new world.
All day, you can open this drawer in your mind,
remember the lamplight before dawn,
scent of morning coffee,
the cat anxious to be on the other side
of any door, while you write.
Later,during ordinary gray
bits of the day, find yourself
Smiling, the air filled with lavender.
Translitic
According to Steve Kowit in his wonderful book, In The Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, “a translitic is a poem ‘translated’ from a foreign language by paying attention not to the meaning of words but to their sounds.” It’s a way to shake loose when words feel dull or frozen.
Translitic based on Jorge Luis Borge’s El Guardian de Los Libros
Here the gardens, the temples, the temple
Of wrecked music and wrecked palaces
The sense of seven, four-sided walks,
The right to be summoned, amicable, in unison
Before the opening night sky and the crowds
That decorate the blue-water emperor
Cued to serenity, fueled by reflection of the world
And especially the compass, dabbling in the fruit,
Torrential respectability at the margins
And the unicorn herd, parting with their fins
All their regrets.
The secrets layer eternally,
The concerts orbit
And each house of memory stands free
in custody of its own world.
Crossing Worlds
We cross worlds each night inside our dreams,
but the images we carry back are garbled.
This is intentional–
Its job is to remind us which are real
of all the worlds we wander.
