"Smoking in Heaven" [by Robert Hass]

Watching young poets in the early evening
Smoking on the terrace outside the poetry reading,
I wondered if there would be a smoking terrace
In heaven. I have a friend, dead now,
A Catholic who was unimpressed by the prospect of paradise
Until he discovered a group of medieval theologians
Who had proposed that there was a special kind of time
In eternity. They gave it a Latin name.
Like my friend, they couldn’t conceive of a God
Who would force them to live forever
Without sunrise and sunset. His wife, a skeptic,
Called it decaffeinated time, at which he shrugged wryly.
This idea of life after death made him very happy,
Which was, as far as he was concerned, the point.
He’s been dead now for almost a decade,
So I suppose he knows one way or another
Whether there is nothing after death and no one there
To know it or not. The smoking terrace would, of course, be out of doors,
So it wouldn’t be as depressing as those smoking rooms in airports
Where people with grey skin submit to their addiction
With religious humility. You could light up and walk to the edge of the clouds
And watch the fragrant smoke you were expelling
Drift into the decaffeinated sunset. It made me wonder
If there were coffee in heaven. Or sex. I knew a woman
Who said that the main reason for sex,
As far as she was concerned,
Was the cigarette afterward. And if there were sex
In heaven, why would there be anything else? Probably
So that you could also watch Canada geese settle on a lake
Just as the moon was twilighting the surface of the water
In luminous little scallops. The young poets
Should read Allen Ginsberg who said that poets should set an example
By not submitting to what he called “the nicotine haze
Of capitalism.” Probably in the heaven without tobacco
The couples are walking by the sea, having already made love,
And the moon, almost unnaturally large,  is just coming up,
And the color of the moon on the water is just like what
Their bodies are feeling, contented but still tingling,
And in the moonlight they can see a pack of feral goats
With their beards and inhuman eyes grazing on the hillside, also contentedly,
As if time and eternity were the wrong ideas altogether,
And the women would have come in with their Greek masks on
To walk the shoreline and dance what fate is.

From Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020), an extraordinary new book by the poet, author of The Apple Trees at Olema and Twentieth Century Pleasures, editor of Poet's Choice, and guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. Kudos, Bob. -- DL

Comments

[Glen Hartley]

Nice, but he should have omitted the last two lines (despite the goats).

[Miriam Berkley]

Thanks for posting, David, this wonderful poem.

[Charles Behlen]

This is representative of the poetry of our time: Talk broken into lines to look like poetry.