Smokes

Smoke is its own poem
Known by name, but ever-shifting.
A shroud or a warning. A canticle or an elegy.
A mouthful of endurance, a taste of surrender.

It is the surrender of wood sacrificing itself,
summer’s warmth surrendered into autumn’s chill.
It curls from chimneys blackened by years,
carrying the smell of home
hands clutched around tin mugs,
dogs restless at the the entry-sill.

It is what you catch on the air
just before the match flares,
before endings crackle and snap,
before ash claims your collars and cuffs.
A lantern swinging in the dark
not yet danger, not yet grief.
Imminent..

It lingers even after the body has gone.
Cherrywood thick as dark syrup;
a grandfather’s pipe woven into the armrest,
a phantom rising from worn twill.
Not unsettling, but never at peace.
It settles into leather, into carpet, into breathing.
It tastes like too much vanilla in cream
something you cannot forget,
a secret you devour.

It is the smoky exhale of whiskey,
coiled ribbons drifting from a glass dome.
Impatient.
It drags through the air,
honeyed and unhurried,
like time itself aching forward.

It stains the canvas of camping memories,
a hunger in the live-coals.
A bloodless civil war – frost-bitten malice toward flame, 
the flame refusing surrender, greedy, 
their banner the same rising smoke.

It welcomes as much as it warns.
A black shroud smothering the sky,
rolling off a mountainside
in choking plumes that crush and drown.
It is the belt inside an engine,
rubber peeled to nothing;
the wire burning beneath floorboards,
stinging eyes before it’s seen,
devouring the last coins in a mother’s purse

Its mother consumes even as she labors.
Lingering, staining
a noose for some, a necklace for others.
It does not let go.
It is the silent witness to rope and martyr,
oil-soaked traitors in the colosseum,
ablaze with passion.

I wonder if the Almighty smells the difference
between smoke from a burnished censer
on its gilded chain in silken hands,
and the smoke rising off rough-spun robes
when Tyndale’s fires were lit.
Does it please His nostrils either way?

It is holy.
Frankincense and myrrh twisting upward,
unfurling toward cathedral ceilings.
Contorted, almost dancing,
trusted and inhaled in stained-glass beam.
On sandalwood pews, it weaves into prayer
like needlepoint in hidden chapels.

But some smoke carries no story, only bodies
pyres thick with regret.
Cities fuming in ruin, never to be rebuilt.
A final gasp of a world devouring itself.
It is the funeral,
it is the flood,
the blackened sky that says – over.

And yet

It is also the clearing,
the soil stripped raw for new seed,
the field scorched clean to its bones.
Smoke is singular but never the same
warning, comfort, elegy, beginning.
It moves faster than we can name it,
and it remains long after it’s gone.