Ace Boggess
Smoke
the phrase that irritates me
when I’m at the local indie store looking for a book
is “posthumous poems”
sometimes title sometimes sub-
I grumble like an aging high school grammarian
or trainer in the orca tank having wasted his life
teaching whales to type:
a posthumous collection perhaps
or a book
no man
writes poems after he’s dead
not even Neruda
who still has sonnets popping up each year
in new translations or lost words found
as if dug up with him in the exhumation
I would tell the shop clerk who might also be the owner
that we write our lines for the dead not they for us
but she smiles & daydreams
about tobacco smoke I smell on her clothes
when what she wants is a short break
or an ending
so that later in the comfort of her grave
she might relax with a posthumous cigarette
THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS
© 2015 by William Ray