Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

Certain Woods
at the edges of
Interstates or back roads
certain woods
are doorways, too
You’ll know them.
Remember how
light falls between those trees
how it lights on that hillside?
It’s easiest to recognize
on autumn afternoons
or anytime in winter, when
the bones of the world
show. See it there? A shape appears,
almost visible through the snow.

In another world, we were crows,
black and aloft. This memory is
why we watch them, wary with assigned
meanings, full of lore, legends abounding

Once, a crow got in our house—who knows how?
That’s how we learned of doorways between
Worlds where we are human and worlds where
we are crows. In some houses (in your house)
The worlds flow into one another In dreams, too.
Those are doors. Some books— Charles de Lint
traveled with his crow girls into some far places.
Another sign, another doorway-
The way your heart tightens when the flock lifts
all at once, from the snowy field.

snow flurries up, falls
where one cardinal lands

Shake This Maple’s World
may have been that cardinal’s
whole mission for the day
when he woke this morning

this week’s losses
include the words for
Advent wreath,
garland
and voice mail

this present moment
and this one,
and the next.
Tiny moments
left unattended
willing
to follow
anyone
Here, take it.
It is yours, this present.
There are plenty
overflowing the bowl of time
O this blizzard of moments
All for the taking.
Joy to this,
world of the present

When your turn comes
(for a breath or a season)
to be lost inside your own life,
When you remind yourself
(almost humming the truth of it)
Oh, how lost, how lost I am,
when that is how it is with you
when humming keeps your hands firmly held
in Lost — there are times (these times)
when having your hand firmly held
is deep comfort, no matter what is
holding you. What if, instead,
you told yourself:
This is adventure
or journey or
a game?
What if this is Hide and Seek?
And the trick to the game is
Stop hiding. Stop seeking.
Open your hands to the wind.

If Monet lived here
at the heart of November
in the heart of these hills
he would abandon his pastel palette
for dark orange maple scattered evergreen
red-topped sumac brown cattails white birch
colors risen up around us
this bowl filled with the end of colors
and if Monet
were like the artist of this day
he might be tempted to go too far,
to make this world ridiculously beautiful adding
rhinestones or diamonds
covering the whole view with glisten of first snow

early November
tentative snow falls
in small steps, straight lines
like someone long away
takes up music once again
playing piano scales
recalling how it’s done
practice, practice

Far from fashion
these poems I stumble into
like acorns, or hidden ferns,
or mysterious misshapen treasures
deep in the pinesoft forest,
beautiful lumpy too large or top-heavy
glazed an odd shade off-tune
or stuffed with too many vowels
beloved doddering mongrel poems
not sleek images for a screen not shiny
not products for a shelf not
curated collected arranged not
Anthropologie or Instagram worthy
Better
these bundles of words twig-sharp edges
of punctuation carried on my back
packed by my own hands tied on like a
warm coat keeping company for the long journey
reminding me to clap for this my tiny superpower
to write down what flows past

the yellow-leafed maple
in the yard who kept her color
and her clothes longer than the others
She dreamed up a new color
yellow glow yellow hum yellow only
stirred together for today
shining deep against a flurry of bark
dark limbs gray sky
and now the snow
she will never look more lovely
than in this moment
and she shivers with the joy of it,
Knowing and Spectacular