Laux - Smoke: poems

poems by BOA Editions, Ltd. Rochester, NY 2000 Copyright 2000 Dorianne Laux All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 10 11 12 9 8 7 For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e mail permdude@eclipse.net Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Codeare made possible with the assistance of grants from the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation, the Eric Mathieu King Fund of The Academy of American Poets, The Halcyon Hill Foundation, as well as from the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust, the County of Monroe, NY, and from many individual supporters, and the Estate of E. M. K. See for acknowledgement of special individual supporters.

Cover Design: Daphne Poulin-Stofer Typesetting: Richard Foerster Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn, Lithographers BOA Logo: Mirko Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Laux, Dorianne. Smoke : poems / by Dorianne Laux. 1st ed. p. cm. 62) ISBN 1880238853 ISBN 1880238861 (pbk.) ISBN 9781938160387 (ebook) 1. 62) ISBN 1880238853 ISBN 1880238861 (pbk.) ISBN 9781938160387 (ebook) 1.

WomenPoetry I. Title. II. Series. PS3562.A8455 S66 2000 895.1dc21 00-057945 There is no smoke without a fire. popular saying To want the world is fire; to obtain it, smoke. popular saying To want the world is fire; to obtain it, smoke.

Tzigane saying She showed me the air and taught me how to fill it. Janis Joplin, of Bessie Smith for my daughter, Tristem,
Queen of Everything SMOKE

Who would want to give it up, the coal a cats eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked into the night you dont dare enter, its eyes drunk and swimming with stars. Somewhere a Dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine. All down the block something inside you opens and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze, trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.

You dont flip on the TV or the radio, they might muffle the sound of car engines backfiring, and in the silence between, streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter as you inhale. Theres no music for this scarf of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough before it thins and disappears. Deaths shovel scrapes the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves. You can hear him weaving his way down the street, sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth before swallowing: breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a womans sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child. You cant put it out, cant stamp out the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through your infinite passages. So you listen and listen and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains linking around your head.

Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke, and blow it up toward a ceiling you cant see where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold, like the ghost the night will become.

for Al His voice, toward the end, was a soft coal breaking open in the little stove of his heart. One day he just let go and the birds stopped singing. Then the other deaths came on, as if by permission beloved teacher, cousin, a lover slipped from my life the way a rope slithers from your grip, the ocean folding over it, your fingers stripped of flesh. A deck of cards worn smooth at a kitchen table, the jack of spades laid down at last, his face thumbed to threads. An ashtray full of pebbles on the window ledge, wave-beaten, gathered at days end from a beach your mind has never left, then a starling climbs the pine outside the cats black paw, the past shattered, the stones rolled to their forever-hidden places.

Even the poets I had taken to my soul: Levis, Matthews, Levertov the books of poetry, lost or stolen, left on airport benches, shabby trade paperbacks of my childhood, the box misplaced, the one suitcase that mattered crushed to nothing in the belly of a train. I took a rubbing of the carved wings and lilies from a headstone outside Philadelphia, frosted gin bottles stationed like soldiers on her grave: The Best Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing . How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? Each one came rushing through the rooms he left. Mouths open. Last words flown up into the trees.

Youre standing on the high school steps, the double doors swung closed behind you for the last time, not the last time youll ever be damned or praised by your peers, spoken of in whispers, but the last time youll lock your locker, zip up your gym bag, put on your out-of-style jacket, your too-tight shoes.

Youre about to be done with it: the gum, the gossip, the worship of a boy in the back row, histories of wheat and war, cheat sheets, tardies, the science of water, negative numbers and compound fractions. You dont know it yet but what youll miss is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed, the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs. What youll remember is the dumb joy of stumbling across a passage so perfect it drums in your head, drowns out the teacher and the lunch bells ring. Youve stolen A Tree Grows in Brooklyn from the library. Lingering on the steps, you dig into your bag to touch its heat: stolen goods, willfully taken, in full knowledge of right and wrong. You call yourself a thief.