Puff Of Smoke Poems

Here’s a prayer
from the Church of Relief,
the Temple of Bullets Dodged,
the Mosque of Joy.

Other days, I’ll remember
theology is complex,
thick with unanticipated
tangles and dodgy outcomes.

Our family has prayed enough
in those other holy places
the Shrines of Why,
the Monastery of No.

But in the glorious now,
it’s only this carol in my head:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you.(Repeat)

We wish you well, wish you a swift return.
We, the ones left here
in the waiting room of old magazines
and lurid wall art, drawings of
lungs, or hearts, or heads,
bright colored and reminiscent
of those pull-down maps
in elementary school classrooms.

Diagnosis. Anyone can see what is,
a collection of symptoms and temperature
readings. The art is in discovering
What it all Means.

You set out with your white coats,
rumpled hair, pale faces,
saddled as Shackleton
struggling to reach the goal.
Not a Pole, but an answer
you can bring back,
solemn or joyful, but fascinated
by the shape and size
of your discovery.

And we wait for you, whoever
we are in this long analogy
drawn out to distract us
from the waiting.
Perhaps we are the faithful
families of explorers,
hoping anxiously for
a return to normal.
Or the wealthy patron
funding this mad journey.
Or the reporter pacing
at the docks,
eager to be the first to hear,
dreaming of the big scoop.

Really, we’re willing to be
anyone, anywhere
except what we are.
Waiting, worried
with any second
the chance of tumbling
into the ice fields and chasms
of another expedition.

There’s no poem hidden inside today.
I’ve looked in all the regular places,
deep into candles lit before dawn.
Nothing.
I’ll build one anyway—
Proving I’m just as selfish as he said.
So here’s a poem shaped from heavy gray air
in a cold marble courthouse
where lawyers step in to deliver
something else I can’t make on my own.
The only prize is no poem,
just a pair of scissors
wielded by a serious-faced judge
with the awful job
of helping me cut this snarled tie.

You, and your two companions
who I only know as “trio”,
soften my heart every year,
on the strength of that one piano line
playing below the children’s chorus
from a simple world drawn in clear lines.
Back there, Charlie Brown and Lucy are ice skating
and tasting snowflakes.
This makes it easier to breathe, here where I live now,
the same way construction paper trees
masking-taped to classroom windows calms me,
this comforting sameness across the years.
I’m almost certain I could peer through that classroom window
and see myself, at 5, carefully gluing colored circles,
counting 1,2,3,4,5 as I pressed each link together,
concentrating, building a paper chain to the future.

I captured two enormous oak leaves
and brought them home.
Dark brown, thick and leathered,
kept for weeks,
they were meant to star in a poem:
Something about plenty and treasure
and being carried on the wind.

Yesterday, I let them go—
tucked them under
the lavender bush in the garden
to escape my attempts to pry them open,
or shape them into a message.
They deserved a rest, having
taught me all they could
about not disintegrating
or growing brittle.

I drift away, like a fickle lover.

Poetry never stamps its foot,

or chases after me,

or texts me late at night

with outrageous demands.

No, poetry goes all quiet.

Then tosses me something—

In the used book section of

the temple of Barnes & Noble,

it slides a book into my hands and disappears.

And we’re off again—

I remember how it is:

A crate full of words,

the lines of a face

arranged just so

and it’s crazy love all over again.