After 30 Years I Still Like the Idea of Lighting Up

My husband says he’ll have his next one 
the day he turns 80, the same way he says 
he’ll ram the final idiot car in front of him

the day he surrenders his keys. Old enough 
now for what-the-fuck fantasies of older men, 
we’re finding our way into later-middle age,

style intact, eyes on the 401(k), Medicare 
our highest aspiration. We see Emerald City 
floating ahead in a happy blue haze, opium

pipe dream in a poppy-red field Van Gogh 
would have painted if he had art-directed 
at MGM. He would have loved burning

Atlanta the same year, would have doled 
speed to Judy Garland, Here, kid, this'll keep
those heels clickin’, as Scarlett and Rhett

drove home through murky backlot plumes
to a disheveled Tara, God as mah witness,
I'll nevah … go back to my office again,

negotiate the parking lot’s fuming-cherry 
gauntlet, the Designated Smoking Place, 
catch a whiff and wonder if I’d still smoke

menthols (Frenched, of course), lazy wisps
drifting mouth-to-nose and exhaled in rings
of Dietrich ennui, spinning ghost-threads

around faces that twist my resting body
just before sleep, the stuff no positive self-
talk, spiritual work, amends ever quite gets,

such insistent pentimento. Why not wrap it 
again in silver-blue brume, watch it float on 
the exhale? I’m way beyond legal now

with a wallet full of cash, just what I used
to cruise as a kid, my pack sitting on the bar, 
needy-eyed and looking for a light. How odd

to look back and lock eyes with that boy, 
to know what awaits him and to wish him
well. Hell yes. There’s a lot I would change.