Ash Wednesday

There are still times when writing when I reach for my cigarette, thinking I’d lit it a minute or so ago and then put it in the ashtray where the cigarette could enjoy a moment or two without me before I pestered it again by taking a puff. Since I no longer smoke the cigarette is no longer there, nor is the ashtray, and I feel good for both of us.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. I missed it somehow, it blew right by me. I no longer smoke, I only think about smoking and only once in a while, while playing the golf I no longer play.

 “Ash Wednesday” is the title of a poem by T.S. Eliot, a heavy smoker, as almost everyone was in those glory days of Anglo poetry. In honor of the special day, I read Eliot’s poem. I knew it was a long poem—parts of which I’d memorized after a psychoanalyst of my acquaintance recommended I do so, believing the exercise of memorization would help cure me of the desire to smoke. 

I smelled the cigarette smoke in Eliot’s poem instantly. And then it got into my hair and on my clothes, and by the time I’d finished reading the poem I needed a shower. I couldn’t get some of the language off me either—‘I do not hope to turn again/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn’, the first 3 lines of the poem—acted as if they were stuck to me, like tattoos I’d outgrown and wished I’d never gotten, though I have no tattoos. 

Because I’m a tough guy I stuck it out—ad infinitum—until I reached the end, in honor of poetry and the practice of enjambment which Eliot, a smoker, uses so artfully.

Psychotherapist to patient, a confidential relationship, a mutant form of confessional poetry. Photo by author, February 22, 2023.