Home’s a shed and wood-pile. Home is bones. It might travel with you, if you ask it to, but you rarely ever ask it to. Home is a dog you love because it’s a creature on four legs, a dog who cocks its face to look at you and beg. Home lies upon the island groaning with trees—and the island itself lies upon the mud-green lake that swells with each hard rainfall. You can see home in the forested island’s ruptured leaves, in its tree trunks which ache into the soil. You can see home in the island’s shadow washed across the cement surface of the water, cast down in the unsaturated light of a sun borne by a sky of clouds which shatter their raindrops to the ground.

Home is the quiet pain of being in your head, the average pain of living in your own head for seven moments chained to one another by the torch of welder. On the forested island, watched by unsaturated light and ruptured light, you are chained to seven moments in your head by the torch of a welder, and you find that home can’t quiet the quiet pain in your head, the average pain in your head. You murdered and conquered home, built it as a rock castle upon a hill of grass clippings. You devoured home in insect mandibles, gorged upon it and loved the rock castle you ruined even as you laid down each of its stones. Each of its stones is a quiet pain, an average pain, laid down by your weathered hands aged with their cumulative weight.

Its stones are as porous as the bark of melaleuca trees and inside each one lingers the coiling smoke of your countless cigarettes. Your face has been aged with the cumulative weight of all that cigarette smoke, the cigarette smoke caught inside the aerosol cans you have sprayed upon the tulips growing just a few yards back from the edge of the lake, its surface broken by the forested island that loves to ingest the grass clippings you have thrown and scattered to the trees. Your face is aged, wrinkled, folded over upon itself within the plumes of cigarettes. Home is cigarettes. Smoke has always been a bad omen, or at least the absence of good omens, and you are at home in the absence of good omens. You are at home sweating under limbs of dense sunlight and tossing to the dying grass the apple cores whose absent flesh you have ingested. You have spent so many happy days wandering in potato fields, wondering if the tubers lying therein want to be unearthed. You always keep your face to the earth, looking for the spuds to climb up from their fertile coffins, waiting for them to break apart the soil upon which you stand and throw you eleven feet into the sky. Once thrown there, and perhaps asunder, you will be unable to see the island upon the lake but whereat you will, nonetheless, see towards the end of the vacuum of space that casts itself outward in the knowledge that it must, always, contract.

You’ve seen the cosmic solstice brought on by winter in space, seen snow drifting in its places and known that the universe never stops walking, and in witnessing its walking, its ever-repeated contraction, you’ve become tired of living and dying the same way a million times, of reenacting birth, of always pissing, eating, shitting, wailing, loving, fucking, hating, fucking, and dying. You’ve become tired of the iron drainpipes with which you’ve flagellated yourself, tired of their rust that has oxidized and corroded your skin throughout the repetition of lifetimes that has not ceased. You know that cosmonauts are at home climbing gymnosperms, but you have never found, as they have, that home is something tangible, like twigs in your hands are tangible, like the powder of moth wings is tangible; you have not found home in space nor in heaven, nor in moths beating their wings to break the sky.

Perhaps you found home once in viewing mountains, where you knew, if you could get high enough, you would eat snow every day and your lungs would spew forth from your lips due to the lightening of pressure. Perhaps you thought home could be in the mountains, or in the rivers that spill down from their crags. You thought home could be in the hills dwarfed by the mountains, or in the flowered vales that puncture the earth between the two. But then you knew, when turning your eyes away from such vistas to your hands upon the steering wheel, that home could be in these places or it could be in no places. Perhaps, you think now, that one of these places, one of these spots in which home resides, is in the pulchritude of the irony in its inherent ugliness.

Home is beneficent, you know that; at the same time that it is ugly it is beneficent. It is also a cracked road of five miles from your house to your village, an aged street across which lies tangles of pith-vines pointing barbs to your ankles and wrists as you swing your limbs by, a brick wall which leans outward and crumbles cement and begs to be set upright. It is your fingertips upon the gravel of your driveway, your flat fingerprints upon its sediment as you take breaths from your cigarette and kneel to slide your hand into its depressions that have, from season to season, been refilled. Yes, home is beneficent and only three generations old, angry that you rarely ever ask it travel with you when you take steps to leave it behind. Home mourns in your absence, erects gravestones next to its walls, shivers as icicles slough down from its gutters, aches as you walk outward through rusting leaves and mutes its cries behind its windows, knows that you know it isn’t really here, in the place it says it is, in this place you’ve lived for one of three generations, in this place where it seems it has always, always, been. Home is not in this place, nor is it in one place, but it is in some place or in no place, depending on who you are and who you’ve thought yourself to be.

In traveling outward from this place through rusting leaves and tangles of pith-vines, you have wished that someone might tell you where home is, what shape it takes under yellow clouds or upon the cusp of rocks. You have wished for a voice to mention a location, perhaps just two square feet of earth or mind, that could stand for home. You want to see it somewhere, in words written on a page, in the thin tremors of a cymbal, in heavy brush strokes on canvas. Until you see it there, you’ve decided that you’ll content yourself in wandering, in traveling with your heart in a box, carrying it around like mules carry sugar and straw and sunflower seeds.

Patrick Barney is currently a graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he teaches freshman composition. His poetry and prose has appeared in Flights: A Literary Journal and 40 Below, a literary journal dedicated to explorations of pedagogy.

– to my father

An exhale – an O let out, then another white ringlet, then others leaving the dark of your mouth, each a loop in front of you, growing increasingly large, spiraling as they widen, until they uncoil, drift apart, gather as a big cloud, clouding the air the color of storms….

*

Even as a child I knew. Each day this happened, each time, it signaled something. I came to understand the smoke from you as an exhale of your thoughts. Not as in alphabet. It did not look like the cursive writing we learned in school, the way our pencils scrolled to connect one delicate letter to the next without lifting from the paper; nor did your smoke zip through air like a plane’s contrail scribbling against the bluest of sky. But it did have a way of being deciphered.

It was more like entering weather, this room with the box of Cubans where you puffed. Once they were lit, the clear air turned milky white or sometimes gray, depending on the sun, of course, and how it entered the window. Sometimes its light stabbed the smoke, piercing through to arrow the floor. Other times the sun’s light shone on the smoke itself angling in a way that magnified its particles. There was sundown too – what painters call the gloaming hour – a time of evening light when the day’s end was aglow, that turned the smoke a hazy blue. Like colored glass that is frosted, or like vapor in a swamp in the dark, that translucent blue risen up from the bogs.

I saw this once, a turquoise haze in a thick forest of pine. It was the night of the winter solstice; the moon so large its light sent blue through the trees. Lit the cold mist, turning it blue. I was with my friend Betsy. At one point, in a clearing, we just stood looking up. There, the moon. Framed in a haze that gave it a halo. So round, such a white face in the sky, its cheeks puckered. The moon kept its mouth fully open, forming the same O as you. As if the moon breathed blue, as if its blue breath was smoky. Like your smoke, in a shaft of light at the end of the day.

The room where you smoked was our den, small with tight walls that you paneled yourself. You even did the ceiling, covered it with white tiles one year – raised yourself on the step ladder, pressed each panel into place. I believe it was after midnight when the entire ceiling crashed. Tiles buckling, falling, a day’s work piled upon our rust-colored rug. In the room was a black leather chair, a recliner which we thought of as yours although you never claimed it for yourself. It was an unspoken entitlement, one that arose of its own accord, or maybe because an ash-stand stood beside it, a benevolent object, fashioned with a tray that seemed always to hold the mauled butt of a dead cigar. In this chair you sat often, working out what lived in you. Your smoke could be like that as well, quietly venturing outward, navigating its course.

Smoke signals, yours, they had an air about them that became the very air we breathed…. It was a big deal to be nearing thirteen and receive a phone call from a boy. My call came while we were at the dinner table and the phone mounted to the wall was conveniently located by your ear. You answered, passed it to me and the cord unraveled to where my face was suddenly lit. Surely I was excited by the boy’s call but you, who knew a particular about him, were not. When finished, after passing the phone back, you paused before excusing yourself from the table. Instead of talking you returned to the den, lit a stogie in the black chair to work it out by yourself. There was a matter at hand, and with large matters you tended to take your time. Later, when I went to check on you, the answer came in the form of clouds. Cumulus clouds, bunched up; cirrus clouds, in long strips like complex sentences. They encircled you – your face tilted upward, eyes staring out. We never discussed the matter of the boy, my seeing him, because, in truth, this look of you already said it. It was like thick language between us. Something to do with the smoke imparting knowledge about this particular, not yet known to my innocent self. Something about this cigar dangling from your serious mouth – which made me say to the boy, in school, he should not call again.

It is also an art. Like wine tasting, like ceremony at a Japanese tea. Cigar smoking involves preparation, which I was to witness early on, in those brief years before you got ill. There was a style to squeezing it until the tobacco was evenly spread. Then, the whiff – when this roll of tobacco leaf was held to your nose. While sniffing its length, you sometimes rotated it in admiration. After, you cut off the cap, the end which was closed. There was a way of gripping a cigar with your thumb on the bottom and all four fingers curled on the top, holding the thing like a piccolo, not chomping down on it but keeping it more like the wooden board of a seesaw, balanced, but also loose, so that it wobbled in your mouth. Then, while lighting, to hold the cigar above the flame, keeping the cap slightly above the lighter. Next, to draw in and puff out, while rotating the cigar so the entire end caught fire. And to just continue, puffing, turning it until the cap glowed. The image I have of you lighting a cigar is slow and purposeful, like posturing in meditation, how one forms a lotus with the body before beginning to breathe.

The act of smoking, I learned, was to just take the smoke into your mouth, not to inhale so that it could travel down into your lungs, but to simply draw in then out, as if your mouth could be an alcove for the smoke’s incoming and outgoing waves. I even tried it with my friend Maria, held it like I saw you do but, in truth, we couldn’t handle the stink, its smoky taste.

Still when I think of cigar smokers, I find them intriguing, something about their process that I associate with their minds, especially in matters of decision-making. Like, Winston Churchill who was inseparable from them. Smoking eight to ten a day, in almost every picture he has a lit one slanting from his mouth. Even so, I’d like to think of his addiction as a habit that informed his person. That, in the act of puffing, or by chewing cigars until they were frayed, it gave him the pause needed for certain decisions. Certainly, an asset to diplomacy. To plumb for the logic, to reach down into the interior world where wisdom reigns, and in this way, the cigar bided him time. So that when he removed it from his mouth, when he spoke finally, his words would mean something. I’d like to think that cigars have serviced some of the great ideas risen from a person. That the act of smoking helped to pace language, like the peace pipe, whose ceremonial smoke gave credence to words.

Aside from serious matters, cigars have also been used as a stage prop, of sorts – adding to the comical appearance of W.C. Fields, enhancing the role of Clark Gable as Rett Butler, or any suave idle of old film. In actual life, the cigar has played in a myriad of scenes – from a smoke-filled kitchen with card players murmuring through their own haze to the wealthy gambler who puffs and pauses in a manner that predetermines his winning hand. None of which seem like you…. Still, if I was asked to match your cigar smoking to any one personality, it would be the smoker as thinker, the Churchill type, and it would be the man who used them for celebratory occasions, as in the look of a proud father who eagerly passed them around moments after a birth.

You smoked in the open. In nature, for example, when we went camping each summer. When nights were all about the rugged dark, and I would watch you, you with us, all of us talking until the campfire went out. Watched the wood burn, heard it crackle. I was young and there were other late nights when I saw from the tent window how everything blackened, how night’s determined darkness overtook our camp. All but for a few embers and that small light from you, that circular orange of your cigar, blinking, like a firefly.

Aside from the occasional Cuban, there were American brands like El Producto, Dutch Masters, Phillies, Tudor Arms. I really liked the boxes they came in. The El Producto box with its image of a colorful woman; the Tudors, in an unvarnished wooden box, fifty of them, carefully layered. Later, the boxes would have other special uses. A place to store marbles or stash paints or start a collection of bugs. The wooden had little hinges in the back and a latch in the front, as if, what it housed was treasure. At times you bought singles which came in glass tubes, which I then used for my self-created science experiments, mixing cleaning products to create various concoctions. You went through other phases as well, the pipe period, for example, and the pouches for the loose tobacco and the cherry tobacco phase which scented the den.

In the 1960s, in the neighboring town of Audubon, was a store everyone frequented, by the name of Korvettes. We were no exception. It was our habit to ride the escalator up to the tobacco department on the second floor to buy one of the special boxes each weekend. After, there was the lifting of the lid in the car. There was the first cigar you drew out to whiff, the paper ring you then slid off and onto my finger.

*

I take signals seriously, as does the moon with its light. As does the moon’s blue light traveling downward to earth. You know how they say that light from the stars is light years away, flying to us at a speed we cannot even fathom. Likewise, I imagine this of your smoke, those signals of old, the swirls, clouds, ringlets that have long gone, let out of our atmosphere – I believe they are traveling onward in some other form, though invisible to our eyes, are still moving through sky, going beyond even, back to whatever it is that is you.

And I believe if smoke signals can do it, so can a person’s words. Words that say something significant, those within us that we want released to the air, to live on. I believe in the power of intent, to send messages forth, to keep language alive beyond the moment of utterance, so that, somehow, they will reach those for whom they are intended. Going where they need to, at times traveling far, words written, spoken, the carefully chosen, words, these – I send them to you. I send them to you.

Therese Halscheid is pursuing an MFA at Rutgers University, NJ. Also an accomplished poet, Therese has been the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Paterson Poetry Book Prize. Her poetry has also appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, and others and she has served on the editorial staff of Story Quarterly.