Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

again today in high school art class
students with oversized sketch pads
sit on the floor
turn towards a long hallway
and learn how to draw that vanishing point

Again today, see how the whole world,
your entire life,
is both exactly itself and a metaphor

Imagine the careless freedom
being young enough
to sit down on that floor and disregard
boot salt and candy wrappers and eraser dust

Imagine a class
where you can practice
over and over
until you learn
perspective

deer prints in the snow
steps criss-cross and meander
each on our own path

Look around—
When news is bleak
When world is frozen, hunched over,
look for light, for warmth,
for joy or the memory of joy—
street lights and porch lights and headlights
shining in the valley,
your love’s smile, those blue eyes,
how your toddler child felt in your arms once upon a time.
Or look at the bowl of clementines
glowing in their orange coats
while a sweet dog nuzzles the back of your knees,
A candle lit,
A laughing friend,
A delicious dinner, delicious book,
delicious date on the calendar to anticipate,
to mark with a smile.
None of it saves the world today.
Notice and say thank you anyway
and you can save this moment,
here in your heart in the hard world
Your heart, which is always the place where you live

Just your Pez head
in the parking lot—
We rush in and out with our
noise of laughter and homework
flurries of sneakered feet and gossip
trampling snow into slush
while you, all day
can contemplate this bright
blue January sky

I am hurried, harried,
hunched over the hoarded treasure
of every minute. You, too?
Do you hover, mutter to yourself
to make haste, to get to the next minute’s
task, and the next?

Today, our homework:
Hold time in an open palm
Stretch your body
Even you
Even I
have time to stretch for one long breath
and then another.

Our long lists will wait for us.
Maybe they will grow calmer too
as they watch us—each inked-in item:
Meeting agenda,
Grocery list,
Gifts waiting to be wrapped and unwrapped—
Maybe they will wait with more patience now
the agenda to include cookies,
the milk and bread and clementines dozing
in the grocer’s cart,
the unwrapped recognizing
this gift of now

again this morning
our dogs bark—
Voices leap from
sleep to frenzy in one
breath. They bark
to announce what?
Murderers in the yard?
Bears? Bad dreams?
A mysterious passerby
only they can hear?
Or just for the joy of noise?
What sound do you make
when you yearn to be heard?

without the snow brush
lost somewhere deep in the calendar
only sensible option?
Pour more coffee

untangle the laptop’s power cord
Charge what has been
asleep for weeks,
packed in a moving crate.
Careful.
Do not let the power cord clack against the floor
which would wake the napping dogs
ever ready to romp.

Try to be quiet about it.

It’s not that words are knocking
but they are nearby somewhere
maybe sauntering up the long hill of what
is now your dirt driveway
Remember? Move slowly in their direction
till you see all the loose letters, spiky consonants
and cozy round vowels come closer
Come, closer

Watch frantic all day
but
only need
some forest time,
honey

As a young waitress
long ago
I learned to balance a full tray
on one hand.

Long ago.
As all the young, I was
Confident
I had what I needed
to carry me through—
with enough practice and my own two hands.

Only decades later
I discover that this permanent wave
of wobbliness
Is normal
Is how it should be.
Our actual trays (I’ve come to see)
are not round and can never be
Steady for long—our trays have lovers and globes,
children and work and art and take out the
trash and call your friend and walk the dog
and eat delicious food—and there is
an eternal fork or wine goblet precariously tilted
at the edge of balance
and oh always shifting
Balance is a wave.
We help each other, reaching for the
fork before it clangs to the floor,
the goblet before it shatters and spills the wine