Smoking
I guess you could say it was always in my blood: I remembergrandpa's long strong fingers around a half-smoked Camel
and the sunslant from the kitchen window. The smoke would
float in strands tangled like his left-hand scrawl, echoing
the swelter of August fields and tobacco-barns where leaves
were strung and hung row by row in the dead still oven of
summer and they smelt of it, gray tobacco-sticks I stacked
in sprawling piles beside my father who formed them into
living architecture around tomato plants with torn strips
of linen sheets tied taut between them.
29 October, 1999
AES