Second-hand Smoker

Even though I don't smoke,
I imagine doing it as a gesture.
I've learned a sign language
of smoke signals from movies
and from movies through friends,
but I can't use these words.
It's a dying language with no
dictionary, like the language
of hats and glasses.

I've practiced in silence when
I didn't have the cigarette to say
"yes" the way I needed to.
If you whispered "Let's
get out of here," I'd pull
my glasses to the end of my nose
and stare you down, I'd draw
my hat down my brow,
and I'd flip my half smoked
cigarette away with that sharp
tap that sends it out
of existence and leaves us
alone and speechless.

Cuts (this is a second poem today to make up for yesterday)

I found a cut on my arm,
a cut I didn't remember
taking at all.
And I find them
often
when I'm most
relaxed and have
time to look
at what my body's
been up to while I
wasn't paying attention.
More and often and less
I think or reason or know
that my mind and my
body are different
persons and love
each other less
and more
often as the case
may be.
But then
I'm ready for two selves,
One that does everything
while the other does
nothing. One the moves,
one that changes. One
that hurts, one that bleeds.

Mirror and Dance

She stands with her hands lightly linked on her belly
and everything around her is brown and white.
The wooden table and the tall mirror, the white wall
and the floor boards, everything but she, in pink
and black, leotard and tights, tapshoes and ponytail.
She looks at her own eyes the way we all do when
we want some answer, some oracle for ourselves
and wait for it to come like an annointing or curse
out of our eyes or the pores of our skin. We want
to stare ourselves down and know the truth
by the way we look away, or keep looking.
Isabel is looking like that and probably getting less
than she's asking, but I see the way that my own
thoughtfullness as a father, the love that heard
her say she wanted to dance and found the dancers,
I see that it isn't in the mirror.
She is the dancer before the dance, the dance
before the dance. Not the dance the father made,
not the dance he cleared a floor for. She isn't
the girl that might dance. She's the dance that may
happen and she's looking for the dance in her eyes.
I'm the darkness around the dance, around the light,
around the girl who dances for she who dances.

Cycles at the Laundromat

A van with tire-spinners turns into the parking lot
of the laundromat. I'm certain that before I had
tire-spinners, I'd have my own laundry room.

I leave my soap and empty quarter-can
in the trust of the other patrons and go outside
to practice walking like a real human being.

This tree has leaves that look like siamese twins
who've finally had it and have started
a deadly game of tug of war.

Walk across an empty parking lot on a Sunday
afternoon and any town fills up with the ghosts
of unsanctioned coming-of-age rituals.

The woman across the street walks toward the place
I'll be if I cross here. Was I going to cross here? I'll cross
here then act lost and cross back. She's gone.

There's a blue sports car surrounded with children and one
young woman pulling on a shirt that doesn't fit right.
She's yelling at the children. They all get in. No one's driving.

Now the laundromat is filling up again with the usual
lot of magazine ad readings, prideless fantasies, bleach,
and me coming back full of oxygen and yellow exhaust.

Vacant

There is a parking lot on the block where I grew up.
Before that it was a grassy vacant lot with a deep
ditch at one end between two white houses.
And farther back there was a burnt out shell
of a small house that was never boarded up
before they tore it down, and one day
we opened a window and went inside.
Before that there were no trees in the yard.
Once, there were no trees in town and once
there were no trains, and once there were no
roads and once there were no houses, once
there we no horses and once there were
no wheels, and once the state was a grassy
vacant lot, and you could see father than
your eyes knew how to guage and the grass
turned into a gold paved parking lot
just under the horizon, but your eyes
weren't there then and there was no
horizon to surround your body with its
closed windows from where you'd imagine
a circle and a center of that circle that moved
as you moved. You weren't there.
I wasn't there either. And we couldn't
have been because they haven't torn us
down. No one has even thought
of forcing open our painted-shut eyes
and crawling in to find out what happend.