Puff Of Smoke Poems

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.

Wow. Lucky that Puff Of Smoke isn’t a person. Distracted by real life, I forgot that yesterday was our 2nd anniversary. I knew it was around here somewhere, but the end of the month arrived before I noticed. WordPress had to remind me.

Some days I wonder how long I’ll keep at this daily(ish) poem practice. I worry about becoming repetitive, or trite, or falling into the trap of continuing because I don’t like to quit commitments. All I can say for certain is today I’ve got something to say. And that I keep at it because I keep learning new lessons. Or the same lessons over and over.

What am I learning here? Big lessons about commitment and creativity and community. And the capacity for surprise.

I’m quietly amazed that I’ve stuck with this for two years.

The other surprise is community. I mostly think of this practice as talking to myself. But this handful of readers who’ve stumbled in and stayed is a constant joy—I love these odd little relationships with people I’ll likely never meet, in different corners of the world, reading and responding to these poems.

Most of all, I’m taking—and teaching myself—a class in creativity.

That sounds Pretentious. But that’s the exact opposite of what I mean by creativity. These lessons, they are not about fame, not about fortune, not about Creativity in Capital Letters. What I’m learning is about living an everyday, ordinary, happy creative life. The habit of showing up, writing a poem each day, keeps showing me the nature of being creative—better than any book or class ever could. I am learning the ebb and flow of it, the constant returning. I love how, even at low tide, I find something interesting when I walk the morning beach—a pearled shell or a hidden pocket of words in a tide pool. A treasure I didn’t know existed until I went looking. A treasure I can’t name until I write it down, again.

Cozy is kept in a cabinet
tidied away each spring,
forgotten. For months it waits
all patience and autumn,
red scarves,
shelves of candles
and apple muffins, spiced
cocoa, stacks of books
an unlocked heart which
tends its own fire.
Here on the table,
one leaf from the maple tree
bright orange reminder
to open this season’s door.

Eat berries one by one
savoring mid-summer
when every field shouts
Bounty.
Tuck that taste away
somewhere safe
for later when you need it.
And you will.
This world behaves as if
it always was and
always will be
Green a world
that never heard of snow
But you know better.

Tiny ones, fifty cents.
Pie pumpkins, one dollar each.
Big ones, grown to be carved,
priced per pound.
The checkout girl explains—
You can tell which are for pies
Those are perfectly round and shaded
A deeper orange. She smiles,
hands me my change, says
It’s my specialty. I’m kind of
an expert on pumpkins.

Sometimes I lose the thread
into the labyrinth where words live
guarded by their mysterious
possibly kindly monster.
Murderer or marvel?
I don’t know because I dropped
the damned thread.
Leaves and skin shiver.
I hold my breath, blindly
reach in the dark, hoping
to touch its frayed edge
hoping I remember
not to grab too tightly
and hear it snap when
I find it again.

No palm trees.
For that matter, no desert
but the spinning world.
We’ve loved vast oceans yet
still crave this particular water
at the edge of this particular lake.
Now and then luck and balance
deliver us to the door, which someone
opens from the inside. We help each other
carry in our baggage, the mismatched and old
scattered among the new.
We take time to admire the lake in all its seasons
as we settle in, ready to fill our cups
with what we need for the next
leg of the journey. Eventually,
we pack our camels
and wave goodbye, refreshed.

Not only light. Birds, too
as particles, perch along
power lines or the barn roof—
long strings of feathered beads.
At the invisible signal
they lift and turn,
tacking against the
bronze breeze from the mountain.
Fluid as white sheets on a clothesline
caught by the wind
another thing that is not water
but streams in the light
Birds lifting as a flock
Birds becoming wave.

Try A Little Tenderness is written in the mud-streaked window of his truck.

On his way to the truck, he sees it. Stops in his tracks. Haunted, again.

He’d been so determined that this, finally, was the day to return all the overdue library books,
the pile of cookbooks checked out after his wife died.

Instead, this other return,
this haunting.

On his way to the truck, he remembers another October when
the world turned gold, illuminated.
How she looked walking towards him—
gold, all gold,
her dog running ahead to greet him, this stranger who the decades
turned to husband father widower
all gold

On his way to the truck, her dog tries to follow because no one wants to be left behind.

So he sets down the books
boosts the old dog up, into the truck
one is limping, showing some wear
and one of them is beginning to rust

He tries to take the advice scrawled
across the window by her ghost
He’s sure it’s her ghost
Try a little tenderness, she hums
so he helps the dog into the truck
and tells himself that rust
is just another shade of gold.