Wind

​I.
the wind moves its corrugated
fingers through the trees
carrying the air’s messages
which, without wind, would
be dead letters, poems spoken
in closets, irredeemable
flowers. to wait in the wind
is to wait to be brought
everything: stormwrack, pollen
eagles, lightning, snow
with a skin- flattening cold,
death, surely; the clouds
parting their stern lips
to utter a syllable of light.
memories, too, so like
October leaves
the incompletion of trees
the lost green words
that you once said but
have since forgotten.

II.
I am thinking too,
of the way we are blown from
thing to thing
through time’s finite doors
pushed as if by planetary forces.
in some dreams we wear
the wing-jackets of shamans.
in nightmares, we shuffle
through gutters like paper
cups. meanwhile, the trees
largely endure; the falcon
draws his mottled knife
and cuts; the clouds
resurrect from thin air.
he who sees through
the air’s plain disguise
to the source of all the pushing
learns the value of standing
sideways.

III.
I crawled across Humpback
Mountain in April.
I was in my mid twenties.
the trunks of oaks
barked and whined;
the birds had fled to
their invisible planets;
the winter-spared grass
flattened itself
horizontal proving even
the dead are subject
to nature. I was afraid, briefly
but laughed about it later.
maybe I bragged some.
it was beautiful to
have endured, and terrible
as if some part of me
for an instant, was told
I had no right.
the wind often lies
like that; one has to test it
to be sure, and therein
lies the rub.

IV.
as a child, tormented by coat-hangers
I  believed I could summon
storms; I desired them.
I had not been introduced
to Lear yet, but years later
would instantly relate.
how the blind lead
the mad, and the mad
mine the air for
stovepipes of lightning
—but even the wise
will walk toward destruction
in order to be rearranged.

V.
but like the mad or wise
I have often wandered
into the White Mountains
above the demarcation of
saleable timber
where the wind chokes
the life out of civilized sound
and the lulls are a crenelated silence
broken only by a tumbled
pebble the mountain
shrugs from its shoulder.
I could easily spend a season
among the rime-flayed krummholz
to which the wind has grafted its
contortions. and to myself:
at times softly peppered
by a glancing kiss of moisture
or savaged to granite until
I corkscrew myself into a fissure
and persist in the habits of a vole.
at night there are sudden partings
as if the clouds have blinked
and the sequined stars drop
so soundlessly they must
disbelieved to be believed
and there are mornings
where the fog holds me in
a gentle glove of whispers
that permit me to stop
hating time. in the end
it is always the lulls
and silences that give me
heart, and in them
I could wait until the
frost jacks the felsenmeer
to splitting and only the
warmth of a loving word
will turn me home.

VI.
I am imagining a world
made entirely of wind
in which one may fall
or blow forever. and
how the body bereft
of more material touch
would become as sensitive
as a phonograph
to the barest of gestures.
let me go there and return
vibrating like a piano
wire, my heels barely touching
earth.