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Robert Frost
As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both ways,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and out of sight
No one for hours has set a foot outdoors
So much as to take care of evening chores.
The inmates may be lonely women-folk.
I want to tell them that with all this smoke
They prudently are spinning their cocoon
And anchoring it to an earth and moon
From which no winter gale can hope to blow it,--
Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.
order in one hand
joy in the other
playing with her smoke
by the fireside
I only see a bright moon
in the clock
Now the days begin to shorten
and when the candle is going out
the smoke descends
like a mind turned quiet
and we hear love take leave
without speaking…
Inside a cloud moved
rapidly by the wind,
I catch a whiff of wood smoke.
All the tracks have melted through,
erasures that say only
that something was there—
except for the trees,
still marooned on the same
round islands.
We didn’t say goodbye
with our hands but
with naked branches.
(And anyway it was
more of a hello.)
You undid me the way
a fire plays a harp,
the strings singing as
they snap. (Each note
can only sound once:
an excellent discipline!)
They are still together,
your smoke & my fog.
(I feed them wood.)
Back when I smoked, as the son of a writer
& a librarian, the book match
was like a brother to me.
Once torn from the book
it couldn’t go back, while smoking made me
an exile from the air.
We both had a tendency to lose our heads.
I was skinny as a heron’s leg;
a book match isn’t even thick enough
to qualify as a match stick.
It’s a minimal page
with just enough room for one word
beginning with a lower-case L
& ending with incandescence—
a holy word, a profane word,
a word for (forgive me) a kind of match.
Crackling cellophane
As the packet opens-
Aroma of tobacco.
Fingers a- trembling, brain a- tickling.
The glowing butt, curling smoke
As the tip touches one’s lips-
Tingle! Deep intake of smoke
Seeps in settling, satiating one’s blood.
Rings dancing in the air
Wafting away into nothingness
Only a fragrance remains-
Then that too, like you, is gone forever.
I sat on the hard wood above the
lapping waves below me
an ashy cig in the corner of
my pink lips
the dust off my youth falling
from the tip and into the world
each breath slashing a whip against my bruised back
the memories of you float on
rotten debris in the water
drowning every smile
every laugh and yell
I flick the cigarette into the sea
watching your ashes dissipate in the water
and only time will tell
if they will wash back ashore
but in the meantime
Entire landscape south
from Boston to N.Y.
cruddy, with technological waste, wreckage
as into darkness
moves this train.
An American, what can I do?
Strange flat ponds
still mirrors under still sky
with grey-brown fur protruding
in their midst - must be
the rough beast that lives there.
Can politics
do this? What
can I do, an American?
A general throwing up of hands!
The means of production
While you put your hands, that,
Our surface
Crossing a bridge or
The other way around the back way or head on, coming
to it
To discover the rules
Written into the distance
while your hands
The house, filling with smoke, the angles used
To talk straight, on,
At last be able
To name.
Your hands naming the thrust and space around it, that,
I would bring you bringing me
Close upon it, so we will look, go through
Hands and smoke
The film
under an eyelid
The roomful
of people
& afterwards
The face
pressed
to a pillow
An irritant
as the smoke
passes
in the mind
in a hut
on a field of artillery
in a fire of napalm
Each puff, I wince
As I know what it means:
Someday soon, you'll go.
Each puff, you know,
But you can't help it:
You just have to blow that smoke.
One day, I'll pick up the phone:
It's okay Daddy,
I'll be prepared.