Gross, loathsome. Trays and plates loaded
like rain gutters, butts crumpled and damp with gin,
ashes still shedding the rank breath of exhaustion —
nevertheless, an integral part of human evolution,
like reading. Cigarettes possess the nostalgic potency
of old songs: hand on the steering wheel, fat pack
of Pall Malls snug under my sleeve, skinny bicep
pressed against the car door so my muscle bulges,
and my girl, wanting a smoke, touches my arm.
Or 3 a.m. struggling with the Checkov paper, I break
the blue stamp with my thumb, nudge open petals of foil,
and the bloom of nicotine puts me right back in the feedstore
where my grandfather used to trade — leather, oats, burlap,
and red sawdust. Or at the beach, minute flares floating
in the deep dark, rising, falling in the hands of aunts
and uncles telling the old stories, drowsy with beer,
waves lapping the sand and dragging their voices down.
Consider the poverty of lungs drawing ordinary air,
the unreality of it, the lie it tells about quotidian existence.
Bad news craves cigarettes, whole heaps of them, sucking
in the bad air the way the drowning gulp river water,
though in hospital rooms I've seen grief let smoke
gather slowly into pools that rise, and rise again
to nothing. I've studied the insincere purity
of a mouth without the cigarette that gives the air form,
the hand focus, the lips a sense of identity.
The way Shirley Levin chattered after concerts:
her fingers mimicking piano keys and the cigarette
they held galloping in heart-like fibrillations until
the thrill of it had unravelled in frayed strands of smoke.
1979: Sweet Lorraine, seventh, eighth chorus, and
I'm looking at the small black scallops above the keyboard,
a little history of smoke and jazz, improvisation as
a kind of forgetting. The music of cigarettes:
dawn stirs and lifts the smoke in dove-gray striations
that hang, then break, scatter, and regroup along
the sill where paperbacks warp in sunlight and the cat
claws housespiders. Cigarettes are the only way
to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful,
something to do while feeling terrified. They cling
to the despair of certain domestic scenes — my father,
for instance, smoking L & M's all night in the kitchen,
a sea of smoke risen to neck-level as I wander in
like some small craft drifting and lost in fog
while a distant lighthouse flares awhile and swings away.
Yes, they kill you, but so do television and bureacrats
and the drugged tedium of certain rooms piped
with tasteful music where we have all sat waiting
for someone to enter with a silver plate laden
with Camels and Lucky Strikes, someone who leans
into our ears and tells us that the day's work is done,
and done well, offers us black coffee in white cups,
and whispers the way trees whisper, yes, yes, oh yes.