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Posts Tagged ‘wind’

These Hot Days


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.

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Unsolid




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.

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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 noticed the part of me that wanted
to wish the wind away. I asked it
to sit with me. With little option
except to be present with each other,
together, we listened to the wind.

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One Unusual Delivery Service

tying my prayer
to a passing cloud—
come wind

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            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

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Becoming the Bird




Once on a bridge
I had met a hope,
a radiant maybe,
a glint of perhaps,
but I am so far
from that glint today
that when I stand
again on that bridge
I almost hate hope
with its stupid wings,
always promising
to carry us toward
something better.
I stand on that bridge
and stand on that bridge,
my inner perch
empty, silent.
I turn to face
the autumn wind.
It batters my bare skin. 
I sing full-throat into the gale.
 




*This poem is in conversation with Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers …” which you can find here

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Just because I can’t hear the wind on Mars
without the sound being raised two octaves
doesn’t mean the Martian wind wouldn’t open a sail—
doesn’t mean it wouldn’t blow off my hat
or fly my kite or create thick swirls of red dust.

Just because I could barely hear the wind on Mars
with my human ears doesn’t mean
the wind wouldn’t flip up my skirt. So many forces
just beyond our senses have powerful effect—
like the words that just today I didn’t hear you say,

yet I know by the way my skin shivers they’re true.
I know, just as sure as the wind blows on Mars,
it takes just one gust to make a thousand seeds go flying.
And I am a weed with ten thousand seeds.
And those words I didn’t hear today, they’re the wind.

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Today when the wind

wrests branches from trees,

cartwheels the watering can

snatches my peace,

I search in me

for a way to praise it,

praise a force strong enough

to rip trees from the earth,

push a ship cross the sea,

and shred what I think I know.

There is in me

a vehement storm

that I have tamed

for fifty years.

Is it any wonder

the wind makes me nervous—

not that I don’t know

how to relate to it,

but oh, because

I do.

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One in the Center

wind that tears

the limbs from the trees—

what is still, still still

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The wind, every day now, the

wind, the wind, the clamorous

wind, it lifts my dress and whips

my hair, the riotous wind, it

steals my words, unwinds my thoughts, the

demanding wind, the wilding wind, wind

that spreads fire, wind that unbranches the

cottonwood trees, the wind, the wind unlayers

me, invites me to find someplace still in me,

the wind, the relentless wind.

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