Two Still Nights

But nothing was still in hindsight.
The cigarette rolled along your fingers
and waggled red ash circles spilling
mites of gray under splinters of the railing.
Your eyes moved jerky-drunk
and we had arrhythmic hearts since morning 
when I’d sung my first I love you, 
long pause, shower still warming,
and your me too swung back low.

That night, fingernails tip-tipping the balustrade, 
but always growing anyways,
and mine came out cracked in notch bands. 
You couldn’t help scratching that or smoking when our host offered,
taking in the fine fair cold night air and letting it out as you were—
complete motion, each blue thread of your iris pulling,
thread of your jeans shifting, hair coiling, ring tightening,
skin shedding, lungs dragging, holding, and releasing.

When I was itty-bitty, Dad crashed
fumbling for his cigarette under the mat—
smoking is an ugly habit to get.

Stop, I tell you, a cold so cold nothing moved:
so split the atom to fuzzy quarks 
and quarks to split seconds and split those again until
all was motionless down to the indivisible, I thought.
Stop; you did. Ugly. Don’t start. Tell him no.
And you passed the cigarette off saying:
People-pleasing pleases you. I cannot accept that,
and my displeasure kept on until at last, 
in apology, you said: I love you too
while falling sideways in the bed, hoping 
I’d grab your legs and spin them right, but still 
I refused and we slept turned wrong and away.

It is years later, on a different balcony better made
that frames the countryside—
distant cows looking bearish on the hill,
tree canopies steaming as pipes of industry,
hot industry mixing sulfur with the riverbed—
and I’m handed a cigarette. Unlike yours,
the smoke does not rise in hard clots
but is herded aside by the wind; 
my flopping fop haircut is blown teeny-bopper too,
and you would have licked your palms laughing 
and pushed it past my ears while I remussed myself 
but at some point it changed. 
Sure, I say, raising the cigarette, 
dragging coughing exhalation out.

Then a nerve rings on my thigh and looking down 
it is a black moth resting.
Soon it will go up again, 
blending with the smoke,
for ceaseless fluttering toward the porch light. 
And doing all I can these days,
I leave it alone.