Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cinema, crying, film, grief, loss, love, survival, wind on September 1, 2025| 2 Comments »
and all the scaffolding
that has held me up
crashes down
and I stumble
from the theater
to find myself
in my body,
heart naked as a cloud.
I crouch in the dry dirt
behind a building,
weeping,
unable to stand,
stunned again
by the truth
of loving what
must be lost.
When finally I rise,
my hat comes off.
How right
if feels in my hair,
on my face,
the wind.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged citizen, equalizing, flag, patriotism, wind on March 2, 2025| 15 Comments »
I say I love the still days best,
but today it’s the wind that thrills me,
how it moves the air
and blows old leaves
and whips my hair
it shifts the dunes
and roars through trees,
and shreds the clouds,
makes canyons moan,
and melts the snow
and spreads wild seeds,
makes energy,
and transports desert sand here,
but what I love best today of wind
is how it equalizes the atmosphere,
brings cool to what’s warm,
bring warm to what’s cool,
I love that it’s created by difference
and it diminishes difference, too.
What wind does our country
need now?
What great invisible force
could appear to equalize us
and whirl us into one?
Oh the wind, how it charges
the air today.
Just rise up, it seems to say.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged holiness, self-blessing, wind on September 12, 2024| 9 Comments »
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing
—Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow”
Let this version of me splayed out
on the ground like a wrung out rag
know this moment, too, is holy.
This terrible moment.
When I cannot fathom my own divinity.
May whatever is sacred move through me
so the hand that blesses me
is my own trembling hand.
So the tender voice that soothes me
is my own broken voice.
My own, but not my own.
As wind makes the leaf dance.
As wind makes the branches sing.
I wish it were as simple as being touched by wind.
Is it not as simple as being touched by wind?
Natural as a newborn fawn learning,
in just moments, to stand?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breath, friendship, laughter, skiing, wind on March 3, 2024| 4 Comments »
for Corinne
Into the wind, the whipping
wind, the fierce, tempestuous,
mighty wind, we skied
as it pushed us and
bent us and slapped us
in a language made wholly
of howl—how alive we were,
laughing into the gale,
taking the storm into our lungs,
as if our breath could learn
its syntax, translate
its tongues of gust and squall
into wild, untamable mirth.
This is how we carried the storm
home in our bloodstream.
This is how, even now,
I feel it in my lips,
an uncontrollable, reckless smile.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chaos, instability, skiing, wind, winter on January 8, 2024| 10 Comments »
I love the days when it feels right
not to turn from the storm
but to move deeper in,
when the body doesn’t shy
from the cold and wind,
when the smile arrives
as the storm magnifies
and a whoop rises from the lungs
like a fierce and hardy bird.
What is it in us that feels more alive
in these moments?
Is it the part that rhymes
with instability,
the untamable part
that knows chaos, too,
is holy? And the gusts
swirl and the chill bites
and the smile
incredibly widens.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged breeze, heat, summer, wind on July 27, 2023| 6 Comments »
And when at last
the breeze comes
on the breath of night,
the whole body sings
with the chill of it—
craves the cool lick
of sharp tongues
on the skin, the bite
of the distant storm.
Touch me here,
says my flesh,
as if I’ve been waiting
all day for my lover—
here, touch me here.
And it feels so good
when the wind slips in
and does what a breeze will do,
but the wanting—
I notice how it, too,
has something
painfully beautiful
to teach me.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, daughter, music, stone, wind on November 16, 2022| 11 Comments »
After I’ve spent a whole day being stone,
my daughter plays our song on the stereo
and my body is whirlwind, a column of air
spinning round and round, gaining momentum,
and what once was sandstone in me is now dervish,
is dust devil, is momentary phenomenon,
and I barely recall what it’s like to be dense
as I sing and my arms rise and twirl
and I swirl through the room around my girl
thrilling in being this woman on this night,
this spinning delight, this whirling release,
short lived, perhaps, but oh for this twinkling,
I’m windborne, I’m dancing across the horizon
and the wind says, remember, remember this.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged presence, resistance, separate self, wind on November 10, 2022| 8 Comments »
All day, the wind, the ruthless wind,
unruly, unsettling, relentless wind,
the wind that crashed the leafless trees
and strewed the branches across the streets,
the wind that scraped at my fragile peace
until I was as dismantled as the day—
I notice the part of me that wants
to wish the wind away. I ask it
to sit with me. With little option
except to be present with each other,
we sit together, listen to the wind.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, prayer, wind on September 3, 2022| 6 Comments »
tying my prayer
to a passing cloud—
come wind
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, change, ekphrasis, Kayleen Asbo, Van Gogh, wind on May 16, 2022| 9 Comments »
while listening to Kayleen Asbo’s “Cypresses”
The wind, that knows itself only by what
it touches, does not whip your hair
as it churns through the wide golden wheat fields,
does not steal your hat as it tosses
the clouds into frothy white and violet whorls,
does not slap your face as you stare
at the silver-green branches of olive trees
upswept into turbulent curves. You’re just looking.
Until you realize the wind has breached the frame
and touched you the way it touches all that it loves,
and your heart knows what it perhaps wishes
it did not know—that all is changed and rearranged,
all gets stirred up and remade, even the cypress,
even the mountains, even the stubborn heart.
you can see the painting here