Smoke by Philip Levine

<p>Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman</p><p>SMOKE<br />By Philip Levine<br />Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?<br />It was. The city was vanishing before noon<br />or was it earlier than that? I can't say because<br />the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.</p><p>This was years ago, before you were born, before<br />your parents met in a bus station downtown.<br />She'd come on Friday after work all the way<br />from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit.</p><p>Back then we called this a date, some times<br />a blind date, though they'd written back and forth<br />for weeks. What actually took place is now lost.<br />It's become part of the mythology of a family,</p><p>the stories told by children around the dinner table.<br />No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way,<br />as objects turned one way and then another<br />to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.</p><p>Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why<br />is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work.<br />Work was something that thrived on fire, that without<br />fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life.</p><p>We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash,<br />Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war<br />was starting up in Asia or closer to home,<br />one that meant to kill us, but for a moment</p><p>the air held still in the gray poplars and elms<br />undoing their branches. I understood the moon<br />for the very first time, why it came and went, why<br />it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us.</p><p>Before the bus came a small black bird settled<br />on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up<br />as though questioning the day. "A baby crow,"<br />someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement,</p><p>his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly<br />for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said.<br />One of the four of us mentioned tenderness,<br />a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me.</p><p>The bus must have arrived. I'm not there