Smoke

It is the 1970s.
Do you know where you are?
It is hard to see anyone, really,
for all the smoke. Most people
are in hazes, purple or otherwise.
Each room in the suburban split-level
of orange shags and avocado wallpapers
is only another compartment of smoke.
Husbands have great difficulty seeing wives
through the smoke, and vice versa,
and often both of them find themselves
tumbling into great masses of husbands and wives
who have ended up in a single bed
that seems to keep growing as sectional wings
are pushed across the empty spaces between neighbors.
Blame it on the Chesterfields. Blame it on Pall-Mall.
Notice how even these names have turned to smoke?
Call the E.P.A. Oh wait, it barely exists yet,
it is still taking baby steps. But it’s not as though
the planet will be nearly destroyed by, say, 2023.
Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters,
argue about different types of smoke
in different rooms of the house.
“You are killing me!” screams the mom
blowing acetaldehyde into the face of her daughter
who wears a sort of thoughtless tribute to slain Natives
made from slain cattle and other sundry unlucky ungulates.
But the young girl’s pants move in an interesting way, like Cher.
It all feels like a smokescreen, from the president
who is no longer a resident, to the Brady Bunch
who might secretly be a cult or commune or Communards.
The young daughter leaves the house, thoughtfully,
in a hunger of smoke, the way it seeks the top of the valley,
the top of the world, just to see everything, rather than strangle it.
She joins millions of other smoke beings like herself
as she wavers in heat by the side of the highway.
The girls and boys who resemble each other more and more
lift up their thumbs as men in vans and trucks
pull over to choose from the assorted meats.
These girls and boys disappear like smoke.
It is only much later that someone will remember
they had a brother or daughter or sister or son.
Sometimes it will be years before anyone knows
anything is wrong at all. They will explain to the police
of the eighties and nineties that smoke got in their eyes
and everything else back then. It was a sort of siren song
that filled your lungs with quiet fire that swirled
round and round, and you understood that your parents
would never understand, and it was okay. But now
we just want her back, the girl who froze in time
that year, who visits us in dreams of backyards
and mood rings and that hamster who rode round
and round on her vinyl records as she laughed
and laughed. What was his name? We want her
back here, to tell us, to settle this once
and for all.