Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

The rest are ready to move on.
Only the weather resists,
with many a backward glance.
The calendar page flipped
geraniums and hollyhocks grew
leggy and tattered
Bicycles and skateboards sigh in their wheels
bored with the back and forth of our street
a dozen times, just today
Sneakers are ready, and lunch bags, and pencils
Even the crayons, hesitant at first,
are shy but eager to begin.
Only the weather, sentimental and humid,
clings long and sunny to the memory of August

Amazement:
How long glass can live
Unbroken
when framed in wood

I talk a big game about this poetry practice. Some months are harder than others. Over the years of ebb and flow, I’ve discovered magic in Taking Whatever Comes. There is a cycle of smallness and plainness, yawn-worthy poems followed by surprising gifts. Some days I open the door to a baby on the doorstep, or a bucket of words like pearls. Some days the doorbell never rings. Some days there’s only a pile of old leaves, with rickety edged words mixed in. But the trick is to open the door and welcome all, even the less lovely, rusted buckets of stones and worms and mismatched words. There is a balance inherent here. Only by kindly greeting all who arrive, inviting them in and offering a cool drink, maybe a foot rub, a polishing and a sending forth again whatever words come knocking—only by this welcoming do all the words, both the beautiful and the barnacle-covered, encrusted with polished stone or grubby pockmarked concrete—only by a genuine gladness to see them all do I move forward in this practice, mysterious and goofy, serious fun.

There are two kinds of people on my street.
On Mondays, some of my neighbors
wheel clackety green plastic cans
to the curb. This, a well known cure for too much,
famous for the removal of
What Would Otherwise Rot.
We all need a ritual to dispose of what indisposes us.
The Monday morning journey down the driveway,
in summer or in snow, is one path.
But some of us, by habit or preference,
take away our own burdens, deliver them
weekly to the town dump. I am one of those.
I say a proper and glad farewell
as I accompany my garbage
on its final road trip. We’ve been together for days
Or weeks, but it’s time. I love especially
the part where I drive away alone
lighter, as if I’ve been on one of those weird cleanse diets
The kind that ends on Saturdays.
Then I travel into a new week, as we each do,
a week,this week, every week, full of
Accumulating and Sorting Out
what to Keep
and what to Toss Away

Shadorma is a poetic form, possibly Spanish in origin,
built on a syllabic line count: 3/5/3/7/5
Warning: In the right mood, it’s as addictive as rhyme!

Most mornings
On long rambling walks
Easily
We solve the world’s big problems.
Neighbors, you’re welcome

Sweep the streets
Of loose rusted nails
Screws, thumbtacks
Be the savior of tires, praised
By wheels of all stripes

Taking a walk, sunny and sweaty
Beneath a breeze, one gray feather
drifts down, lands on my shoulder
maybe a metaphor
maybe a reminder
of who we could be

bull frogs sing their song
two quiet crows dream over
the whisper cornfield

Most times, empty
but the wind, the neighbor’s wandering
toddler, my son’s cat, other mysterious
visitors sometimes leave messages
tucked into my shoe
a ladybug or a leaf
a pebble, a frog, some rain
the occasional spider
hot pink geranium petal
tiny crabapple from the next yard
once a missing sock, retrieved from
who knows where by your cat.
Whatever is found, startling
or sweet or nothing at all
I ponder on my morning walk
sleepy attempt to decipher
little mysteries. Do they
mean to tell me what might
happen in the day ahead or
what I missed the night I slept through
or something else I can’t
translate quite yet?

Do the sunflowers decide?
Do they each select a garden,
or the school courtyard
where the baseball team spit seeds,
or my neighbor’s muddy yard?

Next to the street, at the edge
of a rutted dirt driveway
where he parks his motorcycle
one tall and improbable Sunflower
lights the weedy lawn flecked with car parts.
How oddly they are distributed
these gifts of flowers, birds, the gods.
Who know how they choose
the lucky, bemused winners?

From the parsonage steps,
the minister’s sweet wife waves,
calls out across the street
to tell me what she thinks of you.
He is a jewel, she says.
However, exactly what kind of
jewel you might be
we agree,
neither of us
can clarify

between continents
you send me a text
from the airport in Amsterdam
to say you are reading my poems
on the long layover. Meanwhile, far away
(far away? Well, somewhere that is not
Amsterdam—) here, on my summer porch,
I read your message while listening to
a noisy woodpecker working down the street,
the only other traveler nearby.  Amazing.
Amazing we can hear each other
from this distance. Bound together
but also separate, all three of us exactly
where on this world we each
have chosen or are meant to be