A Compilation of Smoke

Larry Thatcher              

 

And smoke. There’s always that smoke 

down the lane. Waiting, it seems. I go to work 

as town wakes up. As someone’s pitching 

split oak and maple into the hungered blazing mouth 

of a brick oven at the local pizza joint.  

Something windless holds chimney smoke 

at the intersection.

                 Waits for me. I drive up, dividing, 

sweeping the scent into curls before seeing it,  

 

taken back to flashes of campfires, realizing 

where I am along my morning journey, 

as the red light grows into green. 

 

Smoke rises on the early ridges of mountains

south of town today. A prescribed fire, 

to keep the easily agitated highland spirits of the Cherokee 

National Forest satisfied with a wide birth of smudging. 

If it was up to me, we’d all line up before the fire. 

 

                        Find our own cleansing. 

 

The morning is haze-tinted. The snowy gray of clouds. 

The patterned bits of red and pink yet burnt away,  

wanting singed off like early work from our minds. 

Visions of what’s always asleep in the layered forest floor, 

dangerous enough to need 

       annihilation, prescription. 

 

Do we keep enough stores along our ridges, 

dry goods dragged up safe out of the deadwood valleys 

to the rocky tops,

     thoughtful of sight-to-sight peaks

we’ll set afire when words are needed in the sky

for the world to know we’re in trouble again? 

 

But does anyone really watch anymore? In their sleep. 

Can they distinguish between the dangerous fires  

of the world and the even more dangerous fires

of dreams? 

Who watches? Whether they believe

or not? Are there watchers still in the world?