Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

morning,
thick turtle fog
carries home
our little gray cat

I set aside
every day a few
minutes to make
plans I’ll break
later.
Early morning
is best. Scoop them up
(sleepy little minutes)
ladle them gently into a container
compartmentalized and labeled
Organizational Splendor. Admire it,
the Imaginary Day Ahead
shining with good intentions and
predictability. Tamed.
Here is a useful moment to pause and picture
the stoic serenity of Buddhist monks the
look on their faces when they step back
from the yellow blue mandala
intricacies carved in sand prepared
for the next breeze,
the breeze born holding its breath
the breeze longing for the chance to
demonstrate chaos theory

The mandala reflects back to us much information about the nature of the human mind, which has a strong tendency toward the illusion of permanence. The medium of sand, however, reminds the viewer of the ultimate impermanence of this existence as well as of all things.
From Mandalas, Losang Samten 

the kind of party
where the best salad
mixed pretzels and strawberry
Jello. Time passed
we looked at old pictures and rain
from our chairs in the garage
studied your father’s Many Enthusiasms
hanging from rafters and walls. “Is that a beekeeper’s hat?”
someone asks in awe. Everyone has a bear story to tell
or a snake story
or both
When the sun comes out, someone else
says, You can actually see the corn grow
We admire the long curve of wet raked lawn
The allium and bachelor button and thick
stand of what we all call bishop’s weed
how your garden stretches the eye upward
to the edge of the vineyard. Later I drive home
through the bright green hills of our whole lives
from my kind of party

Last night was the last night
for the lemony green of
early spring
This morning the world has
deepened
to true
leaf green
opened by the midnight rain

Sometimes this world
builds a poem
from the simplest things—
Hurrying to capture a poem
about the solemn grace
of slowness— conjuring
majestic maple trees and the
elegance of elephants—

Instead I’m chasing blueberries
spilled from the bowl
(the bowl knocked over in my
Haste to write an Ode to Slowness)
And though I know
I anthropomorphize every single thing
I do suspect those blueberries
(the ones rolling across the hardwood floor)
are laughing at me

Every year there’s a poem
(a love poem) for
the redbud tree in our front yard

When you blossom, bees converge
humming through the air
Is that the poem?

Or is it distraction, how I missed the day
you opened into bright pure pink?

Or how I noticed (finally)
you at the door, framed above
whoever knocked, you as a
huge improbable hat?

Or is it how strangers gasp
during your bright brief reign
as queen of all trees?

Or is it that you do this every spring
whether I write you a poem or not?

Today’s inspiration from The Writer’s Almanac

How can you not be?
Today, for example, Jane
Kenyon, who wrote about
prodigals returned
and Margaret Wise Brown who
looked around a great green room
and saw a telephone and a red balloon
and it’s World Turtle Day
when we are all encouraged
to wear green and honor
a creature whose cells don’t age
as ours do. So Jane and Margaret
(and so many others of our kind)
go on ahead and leave us here
for a short while. Barely long enough
to notice all there is to be amazed by

Written in response to The Sunday Whirl.  This time, came out story-shaped.
Maeve hung cloth fish in bright patterns on that screen door, the one separating the two worlds. Who wanted to look into the abyss all day? Not Maeve. No one entered through the door all spring. This was a relief. Maeve began to relax, slept better in the long afternoons before her nightly prowl. One morning, halfway through July, she came home tired, found Jenny in the kitchen, humming and baking cinnamon bread, no answer at all to where she’d been gone for so long. They ate the bread with honey and mugs of Earl Grey that burned the tongue because they couldn’t wait. Maeve and Jenny talked through the whole day. Neither mentioned the missing fish, bartered away for flour and tea. No talk of why the white flowers hung there now, though Maeve worried over who might be summoned by the mingled scents of tea and toast, white lilacs, white gardenias.

The medium is the message
                                            —Marshall McLuhan

I:
Once upon a time, I’d turn it off
Too many horror movies convinced me:
static might contain
messages I’d rather not hear

II:
driving in these hills
outside signals of all kinds
are weakened and wander
which means our prejudices and
fashion sense remains static and
pieces of radio stories from NPR
drift into small snatched bits of songs
So I hum and wonder
Make up my own endings
to all those stories, my own lyrics
to all those songs
Roll down the windows
Discover the weather for myself

whoever created
all this
whatever else we
do not know
or
cannot fathom
or
definitely doubt
we do know
Definitively
something about
the deep duality
woven into the fabric
of this world because
Clearly
someone could not decide
between
blue and green