On Smoking a Pipe

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On Smoking a Pipe

It tastes of leather books with yellowed pages
and white-haired men who have led reflective lives
on front-porch swings.

The smoke that crawls in silky spires
from out the wooden bowl
like newly shifted silt from ocean footprints

(smoke that is sent to scent the summer night
with burnt vanilla and raisins)
distinctly smells of father figures,

of stuff that was built to work,
of poems and poems and poems
and fireflies and conversations late at night.

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