Smoke by Robert Rothman

Art: Tropical Storm Clouds by Tobias Oggenfuss

SMOKE

Hazy in memory are the tendrils

Bending like long-stemmed irises from

My father’s cigarettes, billowing out

In great clouds of white steam from

Our fireplace at night, black and thick

As a ship’s furnace in the red brick

Incinerator at the back of my childhood yard.

Fading from sight the vaporous system of

Carbon-rich matter rising from

Flues and ducts: messages sent from house to house,

Loose kites with tails curling like cats in

Afternoon sleep and dissipating in white

Puffs scudding the blue sky, gathered

In airplanes writing advertisements—looping

Great curves that hang like placards until

Wind’s strong arm wipes the blackboard clean.

No longer the sugary smell of corn

Stubble burnt in hot embers at the edge

Of roads, great purple balls of sulfurous

Stink belched from factories, the acrid reach

Of tanneries bronzing the horizon,

The cloying sweetness of pigs roasted in

Dug-out pits, open burns spreading

Layers of rosemary and juniper

In a rainfall of invisible ash.

I used to be like my boyhood dog in

Early morning, nostrils twitching in

Anticipation of the rich stew of

Smells, jaws slack to snap at the wispy

Figures floating by. Now my tail is

Flattened and I lie on the wool rug,

Eyes half closed, pawing at the past.

About the author:

Robert Rothman lives in Northern California, near extensive trails and open space, with the Pacific Ocean over the hill. His work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, The Alembic, Existere, the Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Westview, Willow Review and over fifty other literary journals. https://robertrothman.wordpress.com/.

Art: Tropical Storm Clouds by Tobias Oggenfuss

In the artist’s words:

Tobias Oggenfuss is an artist in movement, metaphorically as well as physically, as he explores the kinetics of the world around himself. In effect, Oggenfuss is an integral part of the overall perpetual motion of atoms and electrons, the not so linear photons that reveal our world and universe.

His images seemingly capture Earth’s rotation and that of the cosmos in a surrealist fashion, the deconstruction of our perceived environment and the challenging of our visual perception.

Oggenfuss challenges the banal, thrusts the viewer into a warped reality that actually exists within our experiential comprehension and experiences; he questions and exposes our limitations: he reveals the known. But with the added questioning of the existing kinetics of known and non-charged particles, Oggenfuss simply creates reality-based representations of the ever-present surrealism that escapes us due to cultural experiences and precepts.

Website
https://photomotion7.wordpress.com/

SMOKE

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