cigarony

I know I've not written anything all summer. How frustrating it must be for all those who get the RSS feed! lol Anyway, it's not that I have had nothing to say, it's that I've had too much to say everywhere else but here. I'll try to improve on that.

Susan sends me poems she finds on the internet or through her daily subscription(s). Today's was profoundly meaningful to me.

Literature in the 21st Century

by Ronald Wallace

Long for This World: New and Selected Poems) -->

Sometimes I wish I drank coffee

or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars—

yes, a hand-rolled Havana cigar

in its thick, manly wrapping,

the flash of the match between

worn matchbook and stained forefinger,

the cup of the palm at the tip,

the intake of air, and the slow and

luxuriant, potent and pleasurable

exhale. Shall we say also a glass

of claret? Or some sherry with its

dark star, the smoke blown

into the bowl of the glass,

like fog on portentous morning,

the rich man-smell of gabardine and wool,

of money in its gold clip?

Sometimes I wish I had habits a man wouldn't kick,

faults a good man could be proud of.

I'd be an expatriate from myself,

all ink-pen and paper in a Paris café

where the waiters were elegant and surly,

the women relaxed and extravagant

with their bobbed hair and bonbons,

their perfumed Gauloises, their oysters and canapés,

and I'd be writing about war and old losses—man things-

and not where I am, in this pristine and sensitive vessel,

all fizzy water, reticence, and care,

all reduced fat and purified air,

behind my deprived computer,

where I can't manage even a decaf cap, a mild Tiparillo,

a glass of great-taste-less-filling light beer.

"Literature in the 21st Century" by Ronald Wallace from Long for This World: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Reprinted

I think I'll go put on a sweater and have a cigar...