"Small Pill Of Smoke"
How does life ever end without a sparrow to complete it?
How does life begin, except soberly in a bad dream?
If you were more like the sparrow,
there would be less to catalog, and you
could pass from beam to beam, having to make up fewer things.
A chisel secreted there many years ago by a child
falls from the beam, and the dream ends.
The small pill of smoke falls from its cupboard also.
Seven days sober, Mr. Sparrow, and the story
of life with time on its hands drops a little less severely.
My lucky number was, is, always had been 18.
What did it bring me?
A mural of stick figures and green farms
because my number was closest on either side to the number
my teacher had written on the blackboard and then
cupped over with her hand.
My sister and brother softly made sparrows and other birds
to hover over the stick figures.
Each Sunday, I dropped the small pill of smoke
in the locomotive stack.
The tender whistled.
I made the tender especially whistle near the mural,
white smoke, sober smoke, disappearing
catalog of your mind and days.
Sparrow, if I accept the secret of sobriety,
will you accept my small pill of smoke?
Why don't you call me sometime next week
and tell me what you were doing.
Tell me a story or a dream, or I will tell you one.