Author Archives: Puff Of Smoke Poems

The first of winter’s snow, and turtles holding us up.

Turtles all the way down
and every one of them
prepares for the coming winter
in layers of quiet nights
and knitted scarves, all colors,
all the way down,
to muffle the chill

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

The questions themselves
never leave
only grow quiet
from inattention.
Some wander off,
vague as old aunties.
They become pliable,
easy to tuck away
behind the door,
easy to forget.
You can do this too
with practice. It’s
that same way we forget
where their rooms were
in our house those rooms
the questions live in
Locked doors, those
keys we keep throwing away.

We spend it all
every day
whether we intend it
or not. Hoarding is
Impossible. Like coins,
Hours wash through us
and are gone. The last
of autumn’s warmth
passed while I was in waiting
rooms and hospital gift shops,
or stirring soup in the kitchen
or talking on the phone.
Gone is gone. But
that hour I hurried outdoors
while soup simmered
and caught the last of the light?
That was a good hour.

Instead of quinoa and organic
this and locally sourced that
maybe today I’ll be the one who
eats a frosted donut for breakfast
to see how those anonymous
Others start their day,
trying on someone
Else. My heart ached, I’ll say,
but that donut
fixed me right up, I’ll say,
and reach for another.
I could do this all day.

I tell you ostracize begins
with “O”. Distressed, you say
you were sure it was “A”

He tells you Romeo
never loved Juliet
tells you it was all
a mad scramble of lust.
I never knew that, you say.

So I say
Stop. Just stop listening to us.
Except, of course,
when we’re Right
which we will
tell you
Almost Always
we Are, in Capital Letters.

How could it be
Otherwise
when your loud
uninformed opinions
so different from mine
rub everything
the wrong way
like fur brushed back hard
raising static sparks
which is Bad Enough
but
then
someone asks you
to play your clarinet and
slow warm caramel jazz
flows from your same mouth

For your garage light
in morning darkness
illuminated world of
order and vinyl siding
clipped lawn, basketball
hoop with its net intact
a window out my window
a different world, arranged
just so, as if your yard is explaining
its world view again, patiently,
to all the more disheveled neighbors—
Look, it’s not so hard
Begin anywhere.

Always in autumn, reaching
or flying into pieces
scented cinnamon.

The leaves were content
as a carpet at the curb
till I stir them up, memories
quick and caught and airborne

There I am, once,
watching at the kitchen window, apple
muffins in the oven, apple
children of my eye, and is it them,
or me as a child, decades ago
hurrying home in golden light
leaves and futures caught in my hair
a Betsy Ray book waiting for me
to read of adventure long ago or me
Here, now, buying pens and dreaming a
story about a long journey, a girl
packing a leather satchel, setting out on foot
to slay dragons and seek fortune and become
a tale to tell.

Whatever they were, daydream or figment or nightmare, there were at least two of them and they followed her everywhere. One was a cloud drifting at her right shoulder. She could feel it, the gray draft it made in the air. Sometimes she poked at its edges, no further. The depths of it were fearsome, inevitable and endless. But the other one? Oh, that was a rare and lovely thing. Only visible when she turned her head and looked for it. Green on green, also inevitable, also endless, but this one a happy shadow, growing itself into a forest, tree by tree by leaf.

Sometimes they come back,
the ones who kept walking
out of high school
till they arrived at the doors
to a different life.

Sometimes, after a few months,
Curiosity or homesickness
brings them to us again
the lockers, the tiled hallways
already smaller than they remember.