Cigarette by the Campfire

Scanning the caramel darkness, like
a frantic panther, my cool, thick,
blossoming honey words-rise off
my face, lunging off your fingers
into the ashes, a spiritual experience
scattered into the outlines of mountains.

Yet when you flick off the universe,
I can almost see the anguished edges,
and as you hugged me, I could feel again.

Taking the first drag…

If not for that cigarette, I feared one without you,

Programmed into a phone without reception,
soft as the look of dampened embers disappearing

into a lonely campfire, so petite and luminous,
all covered in the holy, appearing out of the ashen slush.

Somehow Changed

The woman asleep upstairs in the old summer cabin
awakens to the voice of a psychic Welsh friend
four states away. She hears her name called twice,
the voice pitched low, low and guttural.

The woman peers out the narrow open window
to the left of the fieldstone chimney.
A black bear growls up at her, once, twice.
She recoils from the cheese-cloth-screened window.

Theirs is now the last dwelling on the former dirt road
out of an upstate New York hamlet two miles away.
The steep last 80 yards of their road is still dirt.
The woman will recover sleep but is somehow changed.

Do not Google it

Accept that it
slumbers over
silky nets
of sword ferns.

When daybreak
shines on them you
will know without asking.