Smoke from a Fire

At first I feel like playdough

After it starts crumbling the

Blue color a kind of aftertaste

Of crest, but where are the blueberries

Then I feel like yew fronds

Caught in wind billowing gold

Pollen only I thought it was smoke from

A fire, is there a difference between

What starts life and what takes it?

This is a serious question, not a

poem. Like sitting next to someone

at a meeting who is not well, their breaths

do not syncopate to a rhythm, their body

rocks slowly like a music student’s

scrawls on the 5-line clever but

who doesn’t know

how to count. I never notice

how we rise and fall all

in a room until that day, by feeling the

antimetronomic asyncopy of

this person who must have been close

to death. If he had fallen down dead

would I remember it well? There was a woman

off kilter at a poetry workshop once

my friend and I start to fight about whether

a song needs rhythm. I resist.

who died the next day. We sucked air close by each

but she was way too much for me, she was like

a fuse: the verve of life demands things

it’s not just a pretty sparkler

i say, absolutely not. It’s as if he’s saying the

whole way I learned to sway with sisters

doesn’t count.

But maybe we can never

escape how our hearts beat

perhaps the fuse of life is what was burning into pollen

off the yew tree, and that’s what would heal the broken scraggle

rumpledump of blue playdough dried out. Next time it blossoms I’m going outside with glass vials. I am ready to be more, to be blessed, to remember how I’m whole

without being near something dying to remind me by counterpoint, a kind of syncopating of the heart that tolls and bumps

just for me I say just for me I feel just for us.