Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

Yes, blue jays robins blackbirds
graze across the rainy morning.
But what you imagined was
the world’s biggest cardinal?
Half-deflated football
faded by a long winter
in the neighbor’s yard

What is it that pours from our chimneys?
briefly visible
a reminder
during our return to winter
the breath of our alive houses

Spring snow
one miniature maple leaf
frozen to my windshield
Where did you sleep all winter?

Do not ask if this is a one-day special
a discontinued item, or a scratch and dent sale.
Time is offered to you, held out on the universe’s open palm
accompanied by an encouraging smile.
Smile back.
Do not be greedy. Do not compose a list of demands.
This is not a train station.
You will not be given a timetable.
It is time to stop looking for the agenda wristwatch calendar.
An hour, a minute, a day— those measured containers
mean different things to you if you are a human
or an oak tree
or a Luna moth.
This is the given time. Your job?
Take it. Spend it
how is up to you.

not all art requires
red
This morning, for example
gray hills white fields
flecked darker gray brown
gravestones, cornstalks
From the west, blackbirds
Come settle over the field
Color enough

Then the road,
always heading towards More
adds a shock of fluorescent yellow
Wordless, the mysterious black arrow
points at the artful way birds descend
or it points to all the curves ahead

Inspired by a word list at The Sunday Whirl

She wired the stars in the silence of deep space, she who was named The One In Charge Of Storms. The air was fried with static, her hair wild and electric, marring the view of the Milky Way. There were complaints from others.

 
Oh, this was only my first draft, she said. I thought they’d like to look up at night and see lights, to show them when a storm was passing.

 
With a shrug, she let the stars fall everywhere and dreamed up a new idea about space, or maybe it was about time.

 
Instead of sand, let’s fill every hourglass with stars, she said. It will be so beautiful, they won’t even cry that it’s passing. After all, minding manners, taking turns, they can flip the hourglass over again and again.

today, I am in a Mood
floating in a tiny boat
christened Irritation
tossing crumpled up dreams
in my wake. From shore,
life watches for me, life
dressed in red draped in flowers
Mindfulness taught me this—
Stop paddling so hard. Boat and shore
are in the same ocean. Breathe.
The view changes one moment
and again the next as
clouds drift
across an enormous sky.
Who would try to capture them?

Luxury: $2.99 at the grocery store and you carry home a pot of budding tulips through the blizzard.

pink tulips blue bowl
petals open soft snow falls
on the outside world

time again to walk
away from the world of shoes and wristwatches
and turn towards mystery
step through
the door in the hill
Some other traveler
knowing you’d come this way
has left instructions for you
There are survival tips in poems
clues in seashells crumbled by tides
afternoon shadows through evergreens
garden tunnels dug by moles with their own agenda
Look up. There are maps buried in the stars.

written from a word list prompt at The Sunday Whirl

the cold blue blood of the sky
rises over bare fields, edged with ice
rises over us, teeth clenched against
one more day of winter. Birds try again
to shatter February with beaks,
with songs that crescendo over mornings
of every thing rattling in the wind.
Only the bare trees sense it—
their long deep bodies remember
the electric green jolt of spring.
Still invisible to humans, trees know the secret
slow as honey, what rises through their roots