My Mother's Drum

It was sometimes the smell
Of loamy tobacco
That rewarded me

When, on vacations and
The times your mother came,

I chased you down in your
Waved-away veil of smoke,

To see your jaw set under
A blaze of eyebrows,
Warning me away
From a moment of solitude.

Is this the gesture I seek to repeat,
Every time I sit with that blue pouch,
that twist of paper,

And spin my own contraband,
Thinking of flight?