Burning Down the House

Smoke rings against a dark void,
a dervish of white across the blue, figure eights, lazy susans,
helixes and clitty tongues, ampersands and julians. 
Car wheels spinning from interstellar crackups,
cartwheels and the somersaults of saltimbanques,
angels dispersing from the head of a pin
to their fiery stations of the cross.
A new alphabet of elegant undecipherable forms,
delicate as spiderwebs,
black holes forming on the edge of the universe.

A child believes clouds
are made from the smoke
belching from the stacks
of steel mills and factories.
 
Volcanoes are chimneys of the gods.
The smoke rises
from Vulcan's forge, where
lightning bolts are made for Jupiter,
weapons of fire for Mars.
 
Donald Sultan draws circles with smoke
 
Solid, tangible shapes in thin air, metamorphosing
into links and chains and folds of light.
Vessel and gesture, ephemeral but locked into place.
Light becomes heavy.
 
Summer and smoke.
 
The smoke produced by opium is an Aubrey Beardsley yellow.
or a pearl gray dragon writhing briefly in the air
before being greedily inhaled.
Hash smoke is blue as a Bedouin tent.

Marijuana is green, like Jamaica viewed from a helicopter,
or the place in the spine where the smoky chakras gather.
 
Jodie Foster used a cigarette as a timing device in "Taxi Driver."
 
Smoke gets in your eyes.
 
 
Standing in line
at Zabars in a sunday morning,
wondering who smoked the first fish.
 
Pass your child
through the smoke of a wood fire
and it will be forever
protected against conflagration.
 
Where there's smoke there's fire
 
When love goes up in smoke,
those in the line of fire are given
whiskey and cigarettes.
 
Familiar photograph: the Hindenburg
collapsing
in flames and smoke.
 
Sweet Virginia
 
The photographer Lartigue had a fetish for women who smoked.
Marlene Deitrich, in a man's suit, lights her girlfriend's cigarette.
Albert Camus smoked.
Samuel Beckett smoked maize paper Gailoises.
Sartre smoked like a cheminee.
Henry Miller smoked as he scribbled.
Blaise Cendrars smoked with one hand.
Smoke signals from castle to castle;
Celine slouches in a doorway,
cigarette hanging from his lip.
Babe Ruth smoked cigars and they didn't kill him.
Jackson Pollock smoked while he worked,
but the Post Office airbrushed that cigarette
right out of his mouth.
They airbrushed Robert Johnson's
cigarette too;
don't they know that
a man with a hellhound on his trail
deserves a cigarette?
 
The ritual midsummer fires of Beltaine purify the harvest
their smoke intoxicates the Corn God concealed among the crops.
 
the smoke of many ships rising from the sea
Black plumes bursting like smudged
parachutes
behind machine-gunned planes.
 
Churchill and Stalin puffing away on fine cigars.
to stifle the smell of murder in their nostrils.
 


The rancid smoke of the ovens
mingles
with the smoke rising from
the bombed out cities of Europe.
The Lords of Panic and Darkness
scribble
obscenities on a sky
already tattooed with spectral
warnings
of the atomic clouds to follow.
 
Nagasaki, a mist of vaporized human flesh,
concrete and glass and wood
all fused into a new kind of smoke.
 
Mekong Delta, 1970.
Funnels of napalm residue rise
like ladders to the sky.
Contrails crisscross the canopy


firedogs,
smoke eaters,
smoke jumpers,
constantly chasing the flame
 
Kuwait 1991.  Oil fires erase the sun.
Here were the hanging gardens of Babylon,
cradle of the word,
the temple where Hammurabi's scribes
wrote down
the first poems,
first lines on the page.
Word evaporates like sense
in a cloud of depleted uranium,
endless column
of burning vehicles trapped in retreat,
oil fires are funereal pillars
stretching across the desert.
 

The tomb
of the unknown smoker
 
Philip Larkin died of it and Raymond Carver,
the pungent perfume of tobacco,
twenty different diseases in its subtle effusions.
Cigarette smoke will wrap itself
around your heart
and turn the skin to sand
rot your pharynx and your larynx
and creep inside your esophagus,
pancreas kidneys and bladder,
harden your arteries and destroy your lungs,
rot your teeth and steal your breath away.
Ulcers and cataracts and flames of fire in the windpipe.
Freud's cigar was more than just a smoke.
 
Tobacco road.
Double-cupped smoke and mirrors
shimmery New Orleans light
city of sex and Sazerac and fine wines
that luxurious after-dinner cigar
hand rolled down
in the delta where the smoke curls
slowly through the mangroves
 
After sex, the curlicues of smoke
above the plump, rumpled pillows
 
Ohio Blue Tip
 
"The first drag goes right down to your heels..."
 
"I deserve a little fun. I'll have a smoke."
 
Players' please. I'd walk a mile for a Camel.
 
The tourist pauses for a cigarette on the Spanish Steps,
amid the raucous beauty of Rome.
Tobacco tastes better in the Old World.
 
Everybody lights up when Marcello lights up in "La Dolce Vita,"
while smoothtalking Anouk Aimee (who's also smoking) or waiting
for Anita Ekberg to step out of the Trevi Fountain.
What enormous volumes of smoke his lungs processed
in so many cool moments caught on film, elegant in trench coat
or dinner jacket and ever present cigarette, before the gate ran out
and he coughed his heart up off-camera to saint Catherine Deneuve,
lungs totally smoked, expiring like a fish on the deck of a boat.

That pitch dark London fog was simply mist incarcerated
in bags of smoke.Inside late night pubs, "the yellow smoke
that rubs its muzzle on the window panes,
licks its tongue into the corners of the evening."
 
At Kings' Cross, thick volumes of black smoke began
to emerge from the subway entrances,
black plumes like the feathers
on the horses that pull the hearses.
 
Funeral pyres of dead animals clog the sky with toxic smoke
and the wine is rancid and the crops fail.
Forests burning, the planet choking on its own methane.
Promise of paradise revoked.
 
Better to leave the earth as smoke
than to rot in a coffin underground.
Is the wraith-shaped smoke of funeral pyres
dense enough to carry souls to heaven?

Smoke streams from the steel chimney of the woodstove
feels its way around like a blind man in a swimming pool
before climbing skyward
disappearing like an indian rope trick
into the clear morning air.

your breath in winter; like pale smoke
escaping from your lovely mouth
 
Her husband had died of smoking
and one night he
briefly returned
as a long wisp of black tobacco ash
flickering furiously like a dying man
trying to light a cigarette
spanking the bedrail like Linda Blair
a faint odor of brimstone and cordite
filled the room the chenille bedspread
seemed to smolder

with the dead man's rage
but finally the ghost departed
as the wood will
eventually burn
and phantom apples
will ripen in the smoke.
 
The condemned man savors his final smoke.
How good does that tobacco taste?
Can he conjure a smoke ring as big as the Ritz
that will carry him
away from his imminent death?
How long can he make this last cigarette last?
A minute or a mile?
The rifles are aimed and fired.
The prisoner falls, and smoke curls
from the holes in his chest,
mixing with the cordite drifting from the rifles.
With his last sigh, the final exhalation of oxygen
leaves the bloodstream and enters the air,
rising as his spirit rises and disappears
among the ribs and backbone
of the sky.
 
I want to end as
something tangible as smoke
enter this marvelous blue air
merge with the light
become one of the invisible
weightless but golden
drifting with the cumulus
across continents
and centuries
 
Max Blagg