Smoke

As a child, I’d sit at the table
In the kitchen with my mother, both
Listening to my father’s after-dinner
Stories of "the old country," of his
Adventures, cigarette dangling from his lip.
Smoke wafted to dissipate, rough
Words sliced by the ceiling fan
To nothing.  "One day," I’d say (to myself),
"I’ll rise to such impossible glory too."
 

But there isn’t really a story to tell,
Not to him, now, when I pay him my visit
In the chemical stench of his hospital:
Recovering from a laryngectomy.
I wait; he turns; he mouths, half paralyzed,
See what could happen to you?  See?
Barely intelligible, before drifting
Slowly away into a morphine dream.
 

"Yes," I whisper, to this man mass sleeping
In a sterile room, though he can’t hear me
And I’ll not hear him.  But softly,
In this silence everywhere and between us,
Smoke drifts, like dreams left unspoken.
 

(c) S. Parker.  Also published in Poetry Magazine June 2001.

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