of tobacco makes
lichen of my breath
scaling papers of smoke,
the family,
reunions in tobacco fields
in the house built two
rooms at a time, front
to back, kitchen and bedroom
connected across
from tobacco fields;
children trundle into the needed
extra rooms, built two and
three at a time; the out-
house, a two-seater, separate
in the dark, cold, necessary location,
away from the fields
and barn, and cool porch below
the second story
built above the first;
trunks of clothes
and hats, men and women's church whimsies
show the farm, and we,
I taste ambrosia from the kitchen
of my great-great-grannie Maggie's
lifetime, the last breath of her being sound
from her hands holding
a harmonica to her mouth,
breathing for me, the promise
of trees in blood unscaled,
and unscathed by to b. ac-
co- smoking
papers.