The Earth Turns South/To a Baby, Reaching for the Smoke

by Clement Richardson Wood

TO A BABY, REACHING FOR THE SMOKE

For Janet

Your gray eyes dance with ecstasy,A cooing chuckle lifts and purls,And rose-soft fingers laughinglyGrope, as the slow smoke coils and curls.

Out of my pipe, a spiral mistYou reach and close on, gay with hopeThat in your tiny tight-locked fistIt will stay captive. . . . Still you grope,

And still it slips, dissolves, eludesTo feathery nothingness—and a newPillar of grayness slowly broodsUp from the pipe's bowl, teasing you.

If once those rose-soft fingers turnAnd find a solid goal, they gainOnly the soiling pipe, to burnWith reddening memories of pain. . . .

Endlessly so we strain and gropeTo reach some coiling, curling wraith That circles near—dissolving hope,Elusive truth, or slipping faith.

And if too eagerly we yearnTo touch the soul of things that are,We find the touch will soil and burn,And that its memory is—a scar.