Smoke
by Faith Shearin

It was everywhere in my childhood: in restaurants,
on buses or planes. The teacher's lounge looked like
London under fog. My grandmother never stopped

smoking, and walking in her house was like diving
in a dark pond. Adults were dimly lit: they carried
matches in their pockets as if they might need fire

to see. Cigarette machines inhaled quarters and
exhaled rectangles. Women had their own brands,
long and thin; one was named Eve and it was meant

to be smoked in a garden thick with summer flowers.
I'm speaking of moods: an old country store where
my grandfather met friends and everyone spoke

behind a veil of smoke. (My Uncle Bill preferred
fragrant cigars; I can still smell his postal jacket ...)
He had time to tell stories because he took breaks

and there was something to do with his hands.
My mother's bridge club gathered around tables
with ashtrays and secrets which are best revealed

beside fire. Even the fireplaces are gone: inefficient
and messy. We are healthier now and safer! We have
exercise and tests for breast or colon cancer. We have

helmets and car seats and smokeless coffee shops
where coffee has grown frothy and complex. The old
movies are so full of smoke that actors are hard to see

and they are often wrapped in smoking jackets, bent
over a piano or kiss. I miss the places smoke created.
I like the way people sat down for rest or pleasure

and spoke to other people, not phones, and the tiny fire
which is crimson and primitive and warm. How long
ago when humans found this spark of warmth and made

their first circle? What about smoke as words? Or the
pipes of peace? In grade school we learned how it rises
and how it can kill. We were taught to shove towels

under our closed doors: to stop, drop, and roll. We had
a plan to meet our family in the yard, the house behind
us alive with all we cannot put out...


Faith Shearin, "Smoke" from The Empty House. © 2008 Faith Shearin published by Word Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (books by this author), born in Florence in 1469. Machiavelli loved politics and once wrote to a friend that he could talk of nothing else. He's best known for his political how-to manual, The Prince (written in 1513; published in 1532), and the term "Machiavellian" has come to stand in for the book's central theme, namely "the ends justify the means." He observed that princes can and do use unsavory, brutish, or deceptive tactics to gain and maintain power. Humanists called The Prince immoral and the Catholic Church added it to their list of banned books.

In all of Machiavelli's other political works he supported a republican form of government, writing in Discourses on Livy (about 1517) that "it is the well-being not of the individuals but of the community which makes the state great, and without question this universal well-being is nowhere secured save in a republic. ... Popular rule is always better than the rule of princes."

Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century read The Prince as a satire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract:

"Machiavelli was a proper man and a good citizen; but, being attached to the court of the Medici, he could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country's oppression. The choice of his detestable hero, Caesar Borgia, clearly enough shows his hidden aim; and the contradiction between the teaching of The Prince and that of the Discourses on Livy and The History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been studied only by superficial or corrupt readers."

Machiavelli was also a poet, a novelist, and a dramatist. While he was in exile between 1504 and 1518 he wrote a comic play called La Mandragola about the corruption of the Italian government. The play enjoyed renewed popularity in the latter half of the 20th century and inspired two musicals, two operas, and a film.

It's the birthday of Israeli poet and novelist Yehuda Amichai (books by this author), born Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würzburg, Germany, in 1924. He moved to Palestine in 1936 and later became an Israeli citizen. He had a childhood friend in Germany, Ruth Hanover, who died in a concentration camp in 1944. She sometimes appears in his poems as "Little Ruth" and he calls her his "Anne Frank."

He was one of the first poets to write in colloquial Hebrew and he sometimes used an archaic word rather than its modern equivalent and this gave another, biblical layer of meaning to his poems that is unfortunately lost in translation. He told the Paris Review in 1989:

"I'd been raised in a very Orthodox home and the language of the prayers and the Bible were part of my natural language. I juxtaposed this language against the modern Hebrew language, which suddenly had to become an everyday language after having been a language of prayers and synagogue for two thousand years."

He said, "I think when you're a poet you have to forget you're a poet — a real poet doesn't draw attention to the fact he's a poet. The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet."

It’s also the birthday of poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton (books by this author), born Eleanor Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, in 1912. Her father was a science historian and her mother was an artist, and the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when May was three years old. She received a scholarship to Vassar, but by this time she had fallen in love with the theater and her dream was to act and direct, so she declined the offer. While studying acting and voice she wrote poetry and a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine in 1930, when she was 18 years old. By 1935 she had decided that writing, not acting, was her life's work. She wrote more than 50 books: poetry, novels, memoirs, and journals. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) has been called "the watershed in women's autobiography."

In World of Light, a 1979 documentary about Sarton, she said, "I don't write poems very often and when I do, they come in batches and they always seem to be connected to a woman, in my case, a muse who focuses the world for me and sometimes it's a love affair and sometimes it's not." She wrote a novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, in 1965 which is often referred to as her "coming out" novel. She worried, with good reason, that writing about homosexuality would pigeonhole or even dismiss her as a "lesbian writer," and for many years to come, that's exactly what happened.

By 1990 she was unable to write anymore as a result of a stroke but she produced three journals and a volume of verse over the last five years of her life by dictating them into a tape recorder.

"You choose to be a novelist," she once said, "but you're chosen to be a poet. This is a gift and it's a tremendous responsibility. You have to be willing to give something terribly intimate and secret of yourself to the world and not care, because you have to believe that what you have to say is important enough."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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