Old yard

This backyard

I remember smoking a cigar in this backyard.

My father hadn’t been here yet.

Don’t think my mother was ever here.

She would have choked on the smoke.

Now I don’t remember my father ever in this backyard.

Only cigars, I remember so many cigars, each one.

I remember ice skating and smoke rings.

I remember when I tried a vegetable garden

And the tomatoes all died, or at least never turned red.

I remember chasing one of my sons,

I was so angry and everyone watched silently

And his face was tomato red running away.

My mother would have been uncomfortable

In this backyard, without ever saying anything.

My father once sat in the front yard,

with my acting teacher Joe.

My father looked small in a yard chair.

Perhaps I was happiest

smoking cigars in the backyard after 9 p.m.

Before I had forgotten how to set up

an outside light, a beam from the attic,

when the white of the smoke

tinged with blue,

smoke rings that lived like fish,

Like haloes, like thick chicken fat

Bobbing in the night, fat and

unsinkable, and the chicken fat was

mine, my backyard’s, not my mother’s

or my grandmother’s in jars on Coney Island,

my yard,

yellow and blue and fat and bobbing

and the grass so weedy yellow green.

My father never there, my backyard,

lush and brown, and green, with no red tomatoes.