It held.
This mass of brittle
fragile things,
leaf bricks,
joists of sticks,
held.
The tree lunged,
convulsing
in a murderous
hungry wind —
still it held.
When sunset
painted the exhausted day
in a copper light,
and remnant clouds
dithered,
like sluggard thoughts,
it held.
The poet longs
for metaphor
but
doubts.
I’m lonely;
I’ll make me a world,
God said.
Now comes the echo,
in winter wind
— loneliest sound —
that lifts dead leaves
like empty chalices,
a last offering
before ice that freezes
even loneliness,
and the moldering carpet
woven by the wind
becomes blanket
for wiggly unseens.
And yet
I’m lonely
lingers:
each of us,
after all,
only one.
With thanks to James Weldon Johnson for his poem “The Creation,”
and to the anonymous student
in a high school speech meet many years ago
who put it in my head.
In pastel voice the trees sang out
yoo-hoo’d the daffodil
the wind laughed at my camera
and nothing would hold still.
Last night the lightning
tore up the sky;
now remnants gather
and wind sweeps them by,
face-planting the jonquils
into the mud,
ripping the petals
from yesterday’s bud.
No cheer to be had
from this morning’s dawn;
I don’t think I’ll keep calm
but I will carry on.
Saluting the British slogan which has served so well —
until we don’t WANT to keep calm.
Too old and crisped
to fight the wind
whose sport it is
to dizzy me,
I pretend
a diamond rink
in chassé with
Terpsichore.
Some ancient mythic language
ebbing, swelling, weightless
like liquid air
many-voiced
chorus of Sophocles
bade me stop.
I turned toward the sound
the fullness of new leaves
spring petals
soft as babies
supple in newness
stroked by wind
sibilant and sure
wanting me to know
something.
Still as the dead
I listened
taut
to pluck a word
but there was none.
Holding tight in Hoosier clay
at end of thundering roiling day
the plants in tilted chorus say
the summer storm went that-a-way.
When it snows in ol’ Virginny
by the Chesapeake Bay
and sky and the sea
join in endless grey
and the wind blows ice
down each wool bandanna
you know it’s not nice
in Indiana.
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives.
Snow squalls, they said
and what a show
mid-air chaotic
tumble and blow.
White-fisted fury
with wind a-roarin’
but when it was over
there wasn’t much more ‘an
a dustin’
bare crustin’
a whole lotta nothin’.
This was my look
yesterday
as I stared out the window
in flannel’d dismay
at snow mixed with rain
shot like a sneeze
by a roaring cold wind
in a straight-line freeze.
From seventy degrees
to this? Overnight?
Ma Nature’s sense of humor
is seriously impolite.
Thanks yet again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives, Vernon Hill Gallery.
Oddments 