A stick of incense burns down, and a whole romance plays out in the time it takes. Sam Glaspy's poem carries a date in its title like a diary entry ("2/28/2020- Smoke"), and it turns an ordinary moment into a reunion with a lifelong beloved. The speaker lights incense and "once again" meets Smoke, someone loved "my whole life." The central idea is a tender paradox. The beloved can never be held, and the only proof of her love is the trace she leaves behind.
Personification drives the poem, and it is done with little fuss. Smoke gets a capital letter, as a name would, along with a gender and a habit of visiting. The speaker says she arrives "from a cigarette or a fire," which stretches her beyond one incense stick into something that has turned up in many forms across the speaker's life. What she leaves is a smell, "a memory of her visit." Smell is a shrewd sense to choose. It is closely tied to memory, and it outlasts the visual show.
The plot is simple: a confession, an offered hand, a wish to dance. The music the speaker imagines is Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, "my favorite of his works." That is a personal, unshowy detail, like picking the right song for someone you want to impress. Music and smoke are also alike, since both fill the air and both vanish. The note at the end gives "D Minor," while the poem itself says "D Major." The opus number points to Tchaikovsky's violin concerto, which is in D major, so the footnote looks like a slip.
The emotional turn comes in two blunt lines: "When we made contact, / She dissolved." The line break does the work, because touch is exactly what Smoke cannot survive. Then comes the gentlest sentence in the poem: "She apologized, but it's okay." The speaker comforts the beloved who has just vanished, which makes the loss sound small and the love large. Smoke then turns defeat into something else: "she swarmed my senses, / Making my numbed brain buzz." Both "swarmed" and "buzz" are insect words, and the z sounds hum in the mouth. The word "numbed" is intriguing. Judging by the imagery, a reader might hear a faint echo of smoking's dulling effect, though the poem never says so. Either way, the speaker feels most alive when touch has failed and the senses are overwhelmed.
The form suits this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its lines swing between short statements ("I lit an incense today.") and longer, trailing ones. The longest comes at the dance: "Swirling and spiraling, spreading to each corner of my soul." The repeated *s* sounds and the rolling *-ing* endings make the line curl as it is read. Smoke's "dazzling ringlets" work as both hair and vapor, and the lovers dance "around each other," not with each other. They stay close without touching, and the grammar says so.
Tense matters too. The poem opens in the day's past ("I lit"), slips into the present for Smoke's description, and ends in the future: "soon, the incense will go out." The final stanza hinges on two "But"s. The first accepts the parting. The second answers it: "But I love her / And her smell lingers / As a reminder that she loves me." The speaker reads a leftover scent as proof of love. A skeptic could call that consolation, but the poem has already shown that Smoke cannot stay, so the speaker's confidence reads as a choice more than a delusion.
The poem's significance lies in this quiet generosity. It is not polished, and its plain diction suits a speaker who sounds sincere. It attaches the grand language of love poetry to something small and fleeting, and it makes that attachment convincing. It also suggests that some loves are best understood through what they leave behind, a smell on the skin or a reminder that lasts after the incense is gone.