as a kid i always knew
the wind was up to no good
for all it never did me any harm

in the stories it was always
driving the hapless schooner on the shoals
then becalming the shipwrecked sailor
who clung to a spar a ragged shirt for a sail

or it was sidling down back alleys
and through the branches of landlocked trees
under moonpale clouds in the dead of night
squirreling away skeleton leaves
ghosts of plastic bags
and stale shreds of news
to deliver them unlooked for
months and county lines away

or it was whipping up prairie dissent
sometimes slamming a straw straight
into a phone pole
like a hammer drives a nail

or it was snooping up water for later
then freezing it to hail
the size of golfballs
pelting houses and cows
and fleeing into the stratosphere

so i knew not to trust the wind
even though it might never get around to
marooning you or
slamming a soda straw into you

ponder the still eye of the storm

you ll see what i mean

Under the hood:

This one was conceived in response to Jenifer Cartland’s poem that begins “soft drumming / of the vent below the floor…” She wrote that the wind “owns / day and night”, and I thought, it does! Then I started to think what else the wind had been getting up to behind my back. To me the wind is a creature of memory, calling up images (not necessarily memories) from childhood; I started there.

Image: Lie by Holly Lay, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.