Smoke

You have become smoke. Shades of gray drift between reality and a netherworld version of reality. Sometimes rising upward, straight and true and predictable. Other times swirling in ways that seem random to those on the outside. Smoke has its own rules.

I exhale across embers of memory. Long ago I learned to build a fire in any conditions. When a few inches of snow blanketed the hillside above the home place, I blew flames to life and squatted and warmed my hands just for the joy of knowing I could. Smoke rose through bare-armed alders and maples. Fell away over the valley pocked with farm fields and double-wides and a twisting winter-gray river. Where there’s smoke … Other things were obscured.

A flat-roofed house still functions on sweat equity. The barn Dad built with scavenged half-round 2 x 4s and metal from Uncle Marion’s roof suffocates on mouse turds and cobwebs and old hay dust. The chicken coup door swings open. After he died, you kept forgetting to close it at night. Finally, the coon killed the last hen. Now my son and his family live in the house with the only cat who stayed. She missed you at first. These days she stalks voles in the pasture, silent as a coal, coat full and shiny on liver, hair, and bone. But the place is still missing you. When you left, I learned to live with the fire of your rage. Everything began to break.

Your flames have shrunk to nearly nothing. I blow stories across glowing coals until words chase one after another and run together the way the river winds through budding bam trees sweetening the air of early spring. You smile. Sometimes laugh. Then the unfelt wind shifts. You look away, become vaporous and gray with hazy remembrances of a lifetime of wounds, burns that never healed. Where’s your Dad?/Gone five years this month./I have nothing./You built a good family./No one cares./Everyone cares. A campfire is more predictable.

Smoke has its own rules. I clutch at it until my hands grow weary, then surrender. Exhale smoldering frustration. Inhale forgiveness. My eyes burn.