Samples from "Smoke Signals"




ARS POETICA

        The poet is a little God.

            - Vicente Huidobro

It starts slowly.

Like a drop of rain kissing a tin roof
the way a thrown stone skips across
the surface of a pond.
Full of thought and purpose.

A single letter
written on a still, blank page.
One, then another, then another
until a word is formed. A phrase.
A stanza flooding down from above.

Ideas splashing together,
slipping over eaves in beaded columns
of meaning swallowed by a thirsty earth
that later punctuates these run-on sentences
with a single blossom here and there.

Beauty that makes sense
only when you step outside the house.



AROUND A CORNER DOWN A HILL

In the midsection of New Jersey
suburban sprawl spread like fat
around a deskbound worker’s waist.
Raquel and I feared this condition.
We walked every lunch hour around
the office parking lot to make sure
we exercised more than just our
fingers on computer keyboards.
The parking lot was not awash
with cars the farther we ventured
to its border with a grassy field
where we’d stop to breathe in less
congested air. Beyond this patch
of vegetation a strip of black
curved around a corner down a
hill. It was a little-used road
uncurling from a treebound group
of houses hidden from our office
park. But on those breaks from
work I showed Raquel the way that
road led to Carmel in California,
around a corner down a hill to a
three-court outdoor tennis club
I tumbled into with another woman
while on vacation long ago. I took
Raquel with me into my past and
let her see the beauty cradled
on another coast. I never told her
of the ugliness following every
break between a woman and a man.
We only had enough time to travel
around a corner down a hill before
returning to the stale air of the
office and the stares of out-of-shape
co-workers impatient for their next
vacation far away from New Jersey.



CEZANNE’S ORANGES
Cezanne’s oranges are off-center
on his canvas, crowded onto plates
and joined by apples peeking
from beneath the folds of a table cloth
on a table that has three unseen legs
with the fourth support angled
to defy reality.

I think of his still life of fruit
sliding into my lap as I weave in and
out of traffic whenever I drive north
on the Garden State Parkway.
Approaching The Oranges
at Exit 145 I speed by with vehicles
slicing through a cemetery
on either side of the divided highway.

The Oranges in New Jersey are not whole.
They are sectioned South, West and East.
To survive, the living are painted into
corners where they must stay until
tumbling into graves somewhere beside
a highway that cuts through the dead
like a knife through the oranges
on Cezanne’s canvas.



THE POEM MUST END IN PROVENCE

 I want to write a poem
that takes me away to Paris
where I’ll sit alone
in a sidewalk café sipping a liqueur,
my thoughts climbing the Eiffel Tower
one light-headed step at a time
on a cast-iron trellis so delicate
the sky remains undisturbed by its presence.

The poem must end in Provence
where the sun’s gold is mined
in fields of grain painted over ancient
landscapes bruised by Caesar’s heel.
A canvas where nature’s colors
are spread in every village:
greens thick and deep as olives,
yellows like cheese, the crusty brown
of a baguette, icy blues,
creamy whites, tangy citrus
in orange and lime.

Colors you drink in like wine.
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Beaujolais,
Champagne.

I want to write a poem
that strands me in Provence
where I’ll no longer have to search
for another word to begin the perfect stanza.
Provence will be my poem.
Beginning, middle and end.



JERSEY DINERS

 Every time I drive past a diner in New Jersey
I swear I’ve eaten pancakes and sausages there
some long ago early a.m. after the bars have closed
and the only trip left to take is in a fake railroad car.

There’s no way I could have gone aboard every shiny
piece of stationary rolling stock sizzling with bacon,
home fries and black coffee steaming in chipped white
porcelain mugs too American to be called china.

Still, I have the familiar feeling of having spent
an evening’s last few dollars stuffing my stomach
with the nearest approximation of home-style goodness
I woozily had longed for hours earlier as I sat on a barstool.

I know I couldn’t have stopped at all the spots
that uniquely dot New Jersey’s roads and byways
north and south, east and west. But I can travel farther
inside Jersey dinners without ever leaving the counter.

I can travel farther inside Jersey dinners because the only
tolls I have to pay are the tips I’ve left for trips
that lead me home by way of grease-stained aprons
worn by women who always give me what I ask for.