Puff Of Smoke Poems

Here’s another one
Beginning in the dark after
Not enough sleep worrying
Worry worry endless loops of worry
Until the letters lose all meaning
Wroryworryorwyrworryworryworry

And then sunrise on frost-covered hills
turns the trees soft pink. And then someone makes
you laugh. And then a surly teenager unsurls
and grins, says, I have never been as excited
about a book as this one. And then another
one, this one an amateur annoyer, says,
Have you read this? I stayed up till 2 a.m. to
finish and now I need to find somebody
who read it too. I need to talk about this
book.
And this, this is all before lunch.

Read this poem
is an instruction
you can only
follow
if a poem
makes itself available
that is, offers itself up
in answer to your scramble
to do as you’re told
offers itself up like
a last minute date offers
itself up
to be read

not wrenches or hammers
no stethoscopes, no spatulas
no calculators. Instead, we sit
with a school calendar
and thousands of words, built into
sentences, bound into books.
We stack stories around us on the table
as we plot, gambling that this book,
or maybe this one, can reach
from our side of the computer screen
to yours and shake you into a connection,
shake you into being interested,
awake, happy to be alive
and happy to be yourself, with a future
in front of you full of possibilities

the effort a pomegranate requires
now transformed by your hands
into a bowl of deep red seeds–
a tiny hum in the way back of your mind
how it feels to know a happy secret
or a delicious new word
like arils

Poems are easily hidden
in all this dark
tucked into a sleepless night
or behind a stack of old carols
waiting to be found–
they hide the same way that
moms hide Easter eggs for toddlers
“hidden” so they can be found
This one, for instance,
popped up when I opened the box
that held the pink Christmas tree

When Natalie reads
she goes someplace
else
and when she gets there,
sometimes,
there are dragons.

twinkle is the job
of holiday lights
glow and glisten,
sparkle and shine

Later, when the world
isn’t so dark,
I’m already planning
how we’ll remind each other
of what it was like, now.
How we’ll say, in sunlight
and sandals and summer health,
Remember when
dark was so deep
even the words for light
were sparks of solace?

the neighbor’s inflatable Santa
is facedown in new snow
with more falling fast
on his red and white backside
Oh, buddy, I think–
I know just how you feel

Last night,
fog turned streetlight
to ribbons of gold
flecked with silver mist
shining so bright
on an ordinary Monday night
that it stopped me
in the middle of my quiet street
This quiet night
This quiet reminder to breathe
and to see