Almost
The tip of your cigarette
dances through the air:
quick-quick-slow & ready to go.
The rising smoke’s just hovering,
happy to hang around
for another short while.
Today was not a good day.
The buzzards were circling low.
I only came in here to drink
and drink,
give up on thought for now.
(The tip of your tongue
now tasting every sentence
you will not pass on the world.)
I only came in here to hide
till day or something break.
(I was eight or nine years’ old.
The pebbles I took from a beach in July
I touched and carried back to the fall,
to a pond some minutes away from my school.
Those flattened stones skimmed the surface of the world -
shivers going through me,
through the water,
breaking up the silence of the pond.)
Your face,
Wrinkling in the broken light
of these smoke-filled hours,
forever moving like a Chet Baker song,
taking pleasure in all.
Look at you…
Now your hand holds your head,
lifts your chin.
Rodin: eat your heart out.
I love the way you smoke
in holy concentration,
your eyes just a twinkle out of focus;
the parting smoke between your lingering lips.
To realize,
I almost gave up on today,
almost gave up on seeing you
at the other end of the bar.
Now, will I go over and speak to her:
tell her I long to breathe in her hair,
to touch those temples,
move on to her lips -
draw out in charcoal longing
all the blissful skin;
kneel in awe before her and
with trembling fingers
write goose-flesh poems;
undo all the damage of time?
Will I go over and speak to her?
She has seen me look at her and scribble:
stop breathing,
look at her and scribble…
Will I -
will she rest her eyes on me,
attend to the night and its needs;
succumb to her kindness and generous flesh?
I don’t know.
I could -
I just don’t know
but I can pray.