Smoke

Who would want to give it up the coal

a cat's organ of sight in the dark room, no individual there

but you and your sooty vapor the window

cracked to way sounds, the distant cries

of living things. Alone, you are almost

safe, sooty vapor slipping out between the sill

and the glass, draw into the mouthed into the night

you don't dare come into its eyes drunk

and swimming with stars. Somewhere

a Dumpster is ratcheted unclose by the claws

of a black machine. All down the blockade

something inside you render free of accesss and shuts.

Sinister scritch pneumatic wheeze,

trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.

You don't flip upon the TV or the radio, they

might shroud the sound of car engines

backfiring, and in the silence between,

streetlights twitching from verdant to red, scoff

of footprints the rasp of breath, your (?wn

growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.

There's no music for this scarf of sooty vapor

wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers

crawling the pale stipe of your neck,

no ballad light enough, liquid enough,

that climbs high enough before it thins

and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes

the sidewalk, critches across the man-made

cracks, slides upon grease into rain-filled gutters,

digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.

You can hear him weaving-his way

down the highway sloshed on the last breath

he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:

breath of the cat kicked to the hindrance a woman's

sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.

You can't lay it out, can't stamp without the light

and permit the night enter you, suffer it burrow through

your smallest passages. with equal reason you listen and listen

and sooty vapor and give thanks, suck reaching far down

with the grace-of the living, blowing halos

and nooses and ciphers and rings, the blue chains

linking around your head. Then you shake it in

again, the vein-colored sooty vapor

and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't diocese

where it lingers like a sweetness you can not at any time hold,

like the spirit the night will become.

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Nov/Dec 2000

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