Puff Of Smoke Poems

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.” Toni Morrison quote, as heard on episode 707 of The Slowdown, with host Ada Limon.

Do the dead speak?
Do our dead speak to us?
Ever?
I am not certain. But
I am certain of some things—
unbreakable love for my children.
sparkle and surprise of new love—of
you on the phone, telling me—
I can feel you near,
your cheek resting against mine,
even when you are not here.

Are our dead near?
Despite Gaza, despite Ukraine,
despite yet another mass shooting
adding weight to the mass of us
left behind who ask
these questions about their dead
Despite that Toni Morrison quote
Despite you, dying right now
in the middle of ordinary October

You finished early
Done with hospital beds, with loss,
with memories—
Remember when? No.
No is the answer.
you and your memories are gone.
Do our dead speak? Oh, likely they are all
too happy to stop talking and stop listening to us

Despite so much,
I know.
I am certain of some things—
These words, and my human children
held loosely
will return
do return. What else returns?
Last year the eagle’s nest near the pond
fell in upon itself from its own weight.
Last week you died and the weather turned
hard rain and the wind
brought down the once beautiful
Autumn
left the world brown and dull
with sharp sticks of bare trees
scraping at the fog but
Today the gone leaves
reveal what their green hid all summer—
Eagles built a new nest, near the past
and this same morning, in November dark,
I passed a blond woman in a parka, walking
from barn to house with an empty plastic tub,
her head down, on the way inside
to the warm kitchen, having gone out in the dark
to feed another animal. We are, I am certain,
here to feed each other

like seven
and three,
eleven is
a magical number
found mostly in deep forests or
thatched-roof cottages surrounded by
flower gardens and fluffy white sheep—
fairy tale numbers sparkling
in the worlds we dream up
word by word,
once upon this time
and this one
and this one too

Happy Eleventh Anniversary to this, my beloved poetry blog. This dailyish practice has created a deeper, richer life than I lived without it. If you are a dreamy word lover, I encourage you to begin. Find a time of day that you are quiet and alone and begin to play with words. Treat yourself to a small notebook and a pen and carry them through your day, tucked into a pocket so you can write yourself a memo when a poem walks by. Don’t ignore them and more and more will come to you. Then—and somehow this is an important part—find a platform and post them there, little boats of words sailing out into the ocean of the internet. It doesn’t matter if anyone else knows. You know. The poems know. Go ahead. You won’t be sorry that you gathered the words and stirred them around and tumbled them out onto paper and built those letters into poems. And if you do? Tell me—I’d love to hear and celebrate your word adventures with you.

last of the orange
blazes across these hills
as autumn lingers
reminiscing with the maples
over other seasons, long past

sometimes I picture them,
our town’s two traffic lights—
they blink out of sync
red green yellow
all through the night
though theoretically
they might
take a break
when it gets late
knowing
as they do
that rarely is it
when you
or I or any of the neighbors
wake in the night
and dress to drive
or stroll by
either of our corners
to check on them
visit to see how they are, ask
if they are weary of
their long work in the dark.
No, we stay in our beds
where we sleep and dream
or wake and think
The sheep we count wander
into the street—
picture their white wooly selves
bathed in red green yellow
so glad to not be alone in the night
Together, they look up
with their illuminated selves
and marvel at the lights while they blink

• “…Here you can find bags everywhere
  Plastic bags, nylon bags, bags made of kilims
  I don’t know what to put in them
  Maybe my freezing heart, maybe not.”

from A Brief Note To The Bag Lady, Ma Sister by Yusuf Eradam,
in the anthology This Same Sky, pg. 133.

Why must we always?

forget

we are
all
part of a much larger poem
and we choose
every day
every moment
where we stand—
outside it all, reading
the poem
or turned away or
on this day,
in this minute
to recognize our
selves
to shrug and pick up the pen of the daily
and see we are writing it too
along with all the other writers and watchers
and the distracted who believe they are too busy
to read or write and those just humming along because
they’ve lost the thread of the story

Autumn brilliant sun
on all the trees
The season that forces me
to
be
inside the moment—
flash and fire of
Spectacular.
I notice. Even if
I am tired or cranky or
Busybusybusy

Autumn tosses
whole hillsides
of color deepening every hour
And says, Look
Or don’t.
No matter to the hills.
They will blaze and fade fast
in the coming rain
wind that is forecast any day now
to crash this season
into gray and white
It’s up to me to look
and look and look
while I can

meditate
to see
willow where the road curves,
morning sun
lighting autumn’s blaze,
to see
three running deer
and the fourth one
standing on the verge
trembling with indecision

I walk across the morning grass
dew-wet green
to untangle your long leash
Again
leash you thread around tree trunks
at the lawn’s edge
over and over, every morning
every evening.
Once you’ve knotted it thoroughly
you sit beneath the tree you’ve anchored to
with no idea how the rope got so short.
Sometimes you bark to get my attention then.
But mostly you wait,
look up at the leaves and squirrels
and irritated blue jays until
I stop reading or talking, weeding or writing or daydreaming
and notice you’re stuck
and come to you
across the wet grass to unknot your rope.
Even then, unless I take your collar and guide you
you do not always notice
at least not right away
that you’re set free,
unknotted, untangled,
with room again to move

I pedal and coast through the year
summer was one long, luscious glide

Now I’ve paused to have a drink, look around
Study the landscape for my next move
That tall hill of early autumn education

I.
In a separate dream last night,
I owned a small, soft, gray and white bird
with black markings so delicate
they looked painted on
though
in waking, walking around life
I have never owned a living bird

II.
The only bird I’ve ever owned is Pete, the wooden parrot—three feet tall, painted soft shades of green and pink like those pastel mints served at dinner parties in crystal bowls in the 1960s. Or at least, that’s how it was with my mother.
Pete the parrot was trash-picked off a Florida curb, for love, by me—and brought home as the single piece of carry-on luggage that, to date, has gotten the most comments of any odd thing I’ve brought on a plane.
No one else loves Pete as much as I do. Truly, no one understands what I see in him.
This is not the first time.
He hangs now on my bedroom wall where he is the first and last thing I see each day. If it is a day when I end up in my own bed. And excepting when I take him off his hook for special occasions.
Or when we’re traveling.

III.
In college, Anne had a bird. You knew to be careful and move quickly in and out of her dorm room because she let the bird fly around inside. All of this, as so much about my darling friend Anne, was
Against The Rules
I was always a little bit nervous about the rule breaking and also nervous about
tiny claw foot landing
on my shoulder, or my scalp
Plus, this was college—so there were
often
Happy Drunkards with much to say
barging in and out
leaving doors open
in their exuberance to be near
others of their kind

IV.
Once, after I divorced your father
and it was just you and I in our house,
when you were still in high school
Junior year? Senior? Old enough
to know that you knew Everything
and that I was Woefully Uninformed,
a dunce, really—which led to headache for you
(from all that eye-rolling)

During that time, we came home once
and found a large black bird in our house
though the windows were closed
The bird— possibly a crow possibly not
as that was one of the many things
I did not know in those days
or for that matter, in these days still

Back then, you threw a blanket
over the bird and carried it outside
where it could fly away
and did

Both of us blamed you for letting it in through
a long circuitous path tied to an unlatched garage door

Though, honestly, we never knew for certain
that it didn’t arrive from some parallel universe
Where Things Were Different

V.
When I was a small child, back in the days of pink and green mints in crystal dishes, my grandmother owned a parakeet she kept in a tall domed cage. They lived in my house, my grandmother and her bird.
Wings and cages made no sense to me when we were surrounded by windows, so I opened the cage, opened a window.
Later, there were tears.

Epilogue.
In last night’s dream,
our dogs killed the little gray bird
with its soft feathers and delicate black markings.
Not out of hunger or hunting instinct—
No, the bird was a casualty,
a side effect of Dog Exuberance.
Or that tiny, soft, most recent bird
was killed only for a coda
to close this latest chapter
in my life with the birds.