It's been a while. An old one and a new one...

This first one is an old poem. I wrote it a couple years ago (and it might be posted on here already). The second one is a response I wrote to that poem at the beginning of this summer. I had just moved into my new apartment and started to feel comfortable in myself and in my physical location for the first time in a long time (other than while in Italy).

A Cold Night

Smoke and pain twist
Toward the skylight (shut)—
Like the one in my room as a kid
When falling asleep I’d watch
The moon framed by astronaut walls—
And they fill the closed-in porch.

It’s freezing out with my
New coat, the freezing
Where you watch your

Breath (and pain twist
Toward the skylight [shut]—
Like the one in my room as a kid
When, falling asleep, I’d watch
The moon framed by astronaut walls—
And they fill the closed-in porch)

Dissipate into the vacuum
Of cold and marvel that
It’s not already ice.

But the pipe—a gift
From two halves that
Used to (maybe) not be
So halved; who can wrap a box
But keep separate houses—is warm
And something sweeter to taste.

Struck with the sharp finality
Of the interminable:
So smoke and pain
And breath and pain
And anything, and everything,
And pain.

A Warmer Night

Smoke drifts

up imprecise, dynamic

in the late spring t-shirt night,

and from the hammock hung

between two narrow trees I

watch it rise

through branches toward

the moon:

a glowing porcelain iris framed

by leafy cataracts—

the pipe gargles.

Slower.

Better to relight than to burn through.

But I love the way it moves

here

in our backyard [littere]decorated

with debris—a row boat capsized against

the fence, kept company by old

furniture for firewood and the train

clunkering through on the hour. I love

the way the

smoke

——————slips

on slight suggestions of the breeze

(impalpable); never knows the path

or destination, content to rise and the rest

will be a sweet surprise along the way.

I used to smoke in an old closed-

in porch, but the air was stale and stifling

to the curling plumes. They didn’t dance

like they do here.

Slower.

Savor it. Dissect.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really liked

the taste:

not so much a flavor as a gently caustic sting,

but there’s something there to love—a lost

memory, a new freedom—the power to control

time, to transcend nature: to take in a breath

of warmth in an intolerable winter; to track

it, magically visible through the spindly fingertips

of new trees as spring melts into summer.

Slower.

The wind knows where

it will blow

and the moon will never blink.