Wafting

I evaporate—
diffuse into open air
spread wider than the sun.

I love the vapors.
Steam, lapping the rim of my coffee mug,
caught transparent in the bright hope of morning.

Smoke trailing from the tip of a cigarette at night,
slender and smooth as the beautiful fingers that hold it,
soft and sensual, smoke from burgundy lips.

I watch billows of cigar-smoke slowly escape my mouth,
and feel that I am a cauldron,

and bathe in the smoke of breath from
all my sisters and brothers,
day in, day out.

All the sages and all the prophets,
false and true,
bathed in and drank of this same breath
I find here at my bedside.

But I will not talk of the end
with pride of secret knowledge,
as though forecasting horses or stocks.

We drink the sky by moments,
and leave plenty after us.