Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

Author Alice Sebold, as quoted in today’s Writer’s Almanac, (she) “gets up every day at 4 a.m. to write because, she says, “If you start in the dark, the judges are all asleep.””

More a fond note to my caretakers
rather than a business memo, I write—
Oh my darlings, my judges,
who have given me so much
(who else would stop the various
disasters of fashion and faux pas
you steered me away from?)
What I need of you now is a certain
Drowsiness.
We are all getting older, including you,
Including me. We all need our rest and our work.
Let us understand each other.
When time appears with a poem curled
in its palm, a small span a snippet
a smidgen of time holding a handful
of the right words (words here and quickly gone again
a poem or a dream) could you, my sweet ones, my protectors,
my worried helpers, my kind curmudgeons, please
Please nod off? Gently, drift into your leather armchairs
and doze whenever they knock.

Flower pots must be biodegradable
No dogs allowed
Flags only on national holidays
Don’t disturb the spiderwebs, as they are good luck
Fix your family’s cracked headstones. Otherwise,
there is a fine, or a fire where you didn’t want one
If you stumble over loose stones, hurry home. Someone is calling for you.
If you drop your house key…Well, don’t drop your house key there.
That would be best.
Leaves blown across your path? Your grandparents are
thinking of you and smiling, while turning in their graves.

We had different definitions.
I planned time away with poetry—
new notebooks, favorite pens,
a few igniting books, a workshop,
comfortable sandals.

Clearly, Poetry Vacation meant
something else entirely to you, poetry.

You’ve wandered off, down to the river and away
while I was sharpening pencils.
I’ve stopped searching, okay? I’ve been outside
all summer, so I’m tanned and warm. And home.
Nobody loves the desperate,
we all learned from bitter times.
So I’m not. Not yet. I wish you well.
I wish you nights with orange moons,
fragrant festival food, convivial companions.
I wish you tents and boats that never leak,
I wish you horizons full of temples or oceans or mountains
whatever it was you wanted of a vacation.
I wish you enough hours and ink to find your way home.

Seeing the name written down was the worst. When Ian first pointed to their new town on his creased and battered paper map, Violet shivered. And when they arrived, as they drove past the “Welcome To Bad Kettle” sign, dread was the circling word, drifting through the open car window on a perfect summer day.
They both hoped for the best, a new beginning.

By October, Violet won’t walk by the river anymore. She sees faces in the rocks, skulls in the stones. Ian tries to talk her out of it. Perpetually late for work, over the weeks he has gotten attached to the shortcut of the river path. But Violet shakes her head, insists. They both skip the path in favor of the main road to downtown, with its traffic lights and lumbering beasts and hot scent of fuel, though it adds ten minutes to the route, each way.

Ian suggests new strategies, worried he’ll be fired for tardiness. Ignore them, he says. Or give them names. Or walk with your eyes closed, letting me guide your steps over the worn concrete.

Violet, usually so agreeable, refuses. Don’t name them, she warns. Ian relents, changes jobs. Violet is so convinced, and so convincing, that all their friends start avoiding the river path too. Now everyone they know is ten minutes late, all the time, for everything from work to dinner dates.

Eventually, the rumors spread beyond their circle of friends and nobody uses the river path anymore except tourists and the seven crazy homeless men. The city of Bad Kettle adjusts, shifting time by ten minutes. Now between Central Time and Mountain Time, there is a new time zone. Bad Kettle Time.

The path crumbles, is covered by grass. The slope to the water grows slippery with moss.  Left to themselves, the rocks begin to open their eyes in the quiet hour at dusk.

While trying (again) to download
an essay by Emily Mandel and
failing (again), a tiny iridescent insect
lands on my phone screen
and for an embarrassing moment
I think it’s watching the wavering
bar of light along with me, urging
speed—-C’mon C’mon—as if we
were buddies cheering a racehorse.

A breeze lifts his body,
encourages me to raise my eyes.
My breath comes back to me
on the sweet green breeze
and (at least one of us
grateful for this reminder)
together we turn ourselves
back to the summer world

We live in houses full of holes–
beloved, antique, gently
lumbering beasts of houses,
breezes moving through the walls.
So why is it
our well-fortified neighbors
diligent about such things
who are visited
by frantic red squirrels in the den?

Is it today? Is it
ever the right day
to let a spider
weave her web
across your door bell?

Volunteer cosmos and hollyhocks
appear in odd spots, following
the spirit of early summer, when it was
all columbines and forget-me-nots
wandering the garden

Do you have the heart of a wandering cosmos?
Or the steadier, homebody heart of lavender and daisies?

No matter.
All our hearts are possible flowers
turned by roots and rain, sunlight and bees,
into blooms

She’s still in her housecoat, our neighbor from the era when ladies used the word “housecoat,” when she comes to lean on our porch and tell me her husband’s in the hospital.

“This is how it started for his dad,” she says. “But Doc swears this is different.” Then on to a litany of transgressions and missteps among the parents and children in this town she knows so well, words to distract her from other words, hospital words.

It’s better out here in the sunshine, even if this morning is cool enough for a sweater.

The neighborhood hellion of a decade ago walks by slowly with his mom, explaining in a calm voice… ”We’ve been over it a million times. You’re going to list the house and then…” and they’re past us, words lost in bird song and the bark of the new puppy across the road.

The sun tops the roof-line, and we turn our faces up. My son’s calico chases moths and suns herself on the warm porch as we talk. The cat rolls her back on the fallen geranium petals, swats at a lazy bee, one from the nest under the porch floor, nest I’ve been trying and failing to reach all month. Someday soon, I’ll hear them buzzing beneath our wicker chairs.

My neighbor heads home to hang sheets on the line. They’ll dry in the sun while she’s at his bedside. I offer to bring them in before the afternoon rain. The puppy quiets.

I turn back to the idea of a poem, but it’s gone to sleep and left the morning to us list makers and errand runners. The cat leap onto my notebook-covered lap, scattering words like moths and pink petals.

the way you jot down additions
or cross out ingredients
on the page? Add more cinnamon.
Leave out the cilantro. Another note:
Don’t sit too many hours
with today’s stewed basket of words
or the taste grows bitter
like tea steeped too long in the cup