Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

If you forget
for days on end
to take a deep
breath
try now a sip
of air Look
out a window
study
how the clouds
move the day along

Today is the birthday of James Merrill, rich boy poet who
according to The Writer’s Almanac, did not believe in alcohol
for inspiration, describing it as
“like the wet sponge on the blackboard”

Another perfectly clear image
added to the long list
of Archaic Things
my students can’t
understand having
never seen a blackboard
gray with chalk smudge
much less one
wiped clean
turned to
gleaming black

Possibility

Written in response to a word list prompt at The Sunday Whirl.

Kissed enough? Then off to sleep
Sleep tugging at you like a run
in a silk stocking or the threat
of a run a catch in the silk
Catch at it now and you’re there
In this dream You must cross through
Cross through the mist alone
You may hear others, whole groups
of them They are crossing too
Voices carry in the mist carry over
evergreens voices from another path
Directionless? Who can say? Not you,
busy as you are ringed with mist
thickening to fog folds around you
a dampened blanket, gray and deep
Listen for the scarlet bell of your destination
ringing somewhere loud and close
then soft and farther but ringing
Always till you arrive.

trying to fall asleep
balloon tugging gently
I keep repeating
Let go
of the string

In the Teaching Handbook
section one, page one:
Field Guide to Teenagers
Highly skilled at power struggles
Like musicians practicing scales

Answer Key:
Remember
power struggles are
always
a smoke screen

old cat and shamrock
sleep both folded inward
sharing the warm radiator

Lions have all the answers
but we’re too fearful
to ask them the questions
Ditto, tigers. And possibly pythons.
Pythons and tigers have all the answers, too
bringing us, for our purposes,
to the end of the road in the
Animal Kingdom because nobody
believes answers from the less ferocious
goldfish in his cloudy bowl
duck-billed platypus
pygmy goat Why does
it have to be an animal? Paint
brushes dipped in phthalo blue
watercolor— Those paintbrushes? They
Have All The Answers
Or was it the painted pictures the
painters or the scenes themselves
all those sunsets mountains
crashing waves flowered meadows had
all the answers after the painters
packed up and went home to their dinners
when the landscapes could stop posing
and breathe again back to being dirt
covered in rocks flowers oceans
Each strata with its own answers or Hey
Here’s An Idea—
ask the yellowbark oak at the edge of the frame
thick with full rings of new answers every year
but only one way to see his answers
laid out on view in slices crosswise
and I’m not cutting down an oak tree
just to finish a poem so that’s
out and we’re straight back to lions
because rumor on the savanna is
Lions have all the answers

Florida that flamingo-flaunting
state of mind crooked her finger
and we fled south shedding
boots and parkas for bare toes
for sun on our faces for old friends
in a palm frond world where drinks
are the only frozen thing
Back home tanned and loose-limbed
from laughing so hard it’s hard to believe
this is fact not fiction
not a fable but our lucky lives
our fabulous fate

Here is your gift—
take some hours or days (a few)
Remove your sturdy costume
of cool disaffection
your face’s practiced slack of boredom
Jump in with your naked brain act
as if you are fascinated long enough
It will become true Trust me
You will discover a burning passion
to Find Out it begins when you
explore the little alleyways disguised
as footnotes Follow
Paths open into cathedrals and public gardens
thick with fountains and larks
Parrots who fly off over the crumbling stone wall
the wall you never noticed before
those exotic birds of not knowing they are
beckoning to you

your
letter sits
like a bomb
hidden in a drawer
I can hear it ticking
no matter how far I walk
which is strange when you consider it
How many weeks have passed? How many months?
There is no going back. Can’t you still see
irrevocable words written in the smoking air the bomb already
exploded