Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

Reach for the chiming alarm
and it all rushes back home
What to eat how to dress
a poem and did the roof hold
and what is this new ache
between the shoulders?

while they clamber aboard
Advice arrives
like the steam rising
all along the train platform
always the same advice

Open your hands
The advice it never says
if this is to give or receive
or just to shake loose
the crumbs and scraps
the dregs of what you
keep clinging to

Stuck to the gray sky
brushed hills of ghostly trees
their black bones barely showing
Here in town, white billows rise
from every morning’s
industrious factory

Just once, let the smokestacks
puff out grass green robin
egg blue yellow of new leaves
almost open oh let there be
letters to the editor
protesting color pollution
while someone inside
ignoring the press
cooks up spring

Transitions are hardest
Huddled winter house
encased, bristled with ice spears
Now the roof over the wide porch
sags beneath mounded snow
Spring, nearly here, warm and
welcome but first we must
survive the snow melt
Do not buckle, do not break
beneath the weight
of all that’s disappearing

What about the others? What about
those who turn down the wrong dirt road
late at night and end up in deep trouble
mudslide or military coup, runaway train
or runaway lion, a robber a killer
a man with a knife
Where were their angels why not
softly glowing or armed with
mighty swords? Asleep? Off duty?
Do not tell me
It’s A Mystery.
That is no answer for those others
with their hands held out,
waiting for their angels.

He said,
“I can’t remember
about dragons.
Were they real? I know
not now, but ever?
Were they real once,
even long ago?
No?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
But for a minute,”
he said,
“I just wasn’t sure.”

Magic lurks inside
queer unnamed pockets of time
those seconds while
we’re still falling
before we crash back into this real world,
the world where we know for sure

“Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”  Steve Jobs, quoted on The Writers Almanac, 24 Feb. 2015.
Ladies of a certain age
do not hasten to the bagginess
of nakedness we
have learned even clothed
to follow the heart
after years of lovenotlove
children or not
jobs and homes and
pleasing, trying and pleasing
and being such very good girls
we have let go of much we
learned the steps by practice
losing keys and houses and people
oh my tribe
naked or not they are dancing
towards their hearts

The sun we barely remember
hides all winter in the barn
clever sun concealed
but stealing glimpses
between weather battered boards.

This season abides
in a box labeled Endure
Beneath the lid, cold
beauty, fairy lights,
cozy treasures
but still
the box is unwieldy
oddly shaped it fits
none of our shelves
being much too large
and every white corner
stretches too far

To Northern eyes
every wave might
by a trick of the light
hide a cresting dolphin
pelicans and palm trees
are real enough but
river coconuts in pairs
or bobbing trios
frolic near the pier,
carried by the current
amazing floating coconuts
or possibly papayas
keep imitating a family
of happy manatees

Too early. Or late.
In either direction
the wrong time
to be awake
discovering
oxymorons
stumbling around
such as, for example,
pleasure travel
which is the symptom
that shows exactly
why you’d better