In the daylight the wind in high branches
can at least be seen if not heard
In the spring it will regain its voice
the trees will put on their hands and applaud
Their applause is what we hear
The performance itself slips through ungrasped
My boy’s breathing is fine. The moon is late rising,
The palm of night presses down. A few stars.
As eyes close the pressure inside and outside
The eyelid equalizes like the pressure inside
And outside the house. The house sees nothing too.
The wind like Zhu Xi sees nothing and begins
To investigate things with clarity. A few windy
Mornings ago I drove my son to the hospital
After he could not stand up because of the pain.
The night pressed in on the windows of the car.
Though it was perfectly still outside my panic
Drove the air into my resisting frame.
Zhu Xi was so still and undisturbed
He could have been lying against my windshield
And I would have seen right through
Him whispering knowledge and action
Are indivisible. After morphine and the three
Incisions, after the handcuffed prisoner
Who swallowed metal things was rolled out
Of the ER, after the appendix, vestigial
Like a scholarly appendix, was removed
Zhu Xi was an untouched cup of coffee.
A still Saturday morning parking lot.
Days later I am still there. Zhu Xi
In the back seat because you are
Beside me. Zhu Xi pressed against
The bedroom window like a giant moth
We look through waiting for the moon
Through closed eyelids to appear on
His wing. My son’s breathing is fine.
I can still outrun my children
but the race has to be very short
or very long. And the middle space
widens every day,
We drove out of town in early spring
to visit a friend of my daughter
whose family makes church organs
among the folded hills of Virginia farmland.
There the metal is boiled and poured
in a long flat trough, so thin it can
be rolled into the pipes that channel
air into faith-appropriate pitch.
The cows leisurely await their doom
in the fields all around.
The sharp shinned hawk flies low
across the field and alights on an old post.
The family’s house is a crossroad of winds–
every stiff breeze in the valley seems to force
its way toward the house, from every direction,
speeding through foothill and gap,
funneled by finely ill-mapped roads,
reaches their yard finally as a constant gale
ripping the voice from trees and shrubs as we stumble
to the side door. My daughter’s friend
is used to it, she shouts from the porch, it never ends.
I think it is all the winds of the world auditioning
for a chance to flow through those pipes
and into the shadows of stillness
and be heard as something straight from God.
At home it is calm as a confessional.
The library across the street is closed.
We always have books to bring back,
and we always find them when the library
is closed. The silver maple next door
is so covered with English ivy it should be dead
but it has bloomed again this year,
enough to make the blue jay invisible.
I recognize his pitched query as others recognize
in the church organ the vowels of God.
I hear, in my own breath as I stand on the porch,
that same fierce longing as those winds
to become somebody else’s voice.
1.
Spring storms roam across the valley.
On the maple, leaves appear like gypsy tents.
Wind off the mountainside ruffles the green edges:
inside one of the leaves sits a woman at a fortune telling table
laying the lone card of summer face-down.
Old pine tree seems the only one
excited by the first warm wind
Empty-handed, the others barely nod
at his hundred foot tall child’s soul
Who remembers the world with no flowers
no leaves no bees who knows
What was and knows what’s coming
In a space under trees I can hear the wind that is not here
like a can kicked across the street by a boy still coming
or as if the act of the boy shaping his mouth to shout
made a sound before the sound of the shout
What is the word that I hear before the trees
above me shake and give the wind a momentary word
What is the sound of a loosening of leaves
like forgetting hands just before they drop
to our sides? The interval of apprehension.
The time we are alive. The boy stepping up the curb.
April leaves have given the wind a face and a voice
but not a body and not a will. Facing the headwind
Of great deeds and tragedies, I think we feel the same:
fear and awe at power without will, animating a hero.
I crack the window, listen:
What message can this cold wind carry
but this breeze won’t tilt my room’s way and come in
I reach out it slips through my fingers
Unkind even to the moon it has taken a little off the top
Diminished month sent howling through the pines
Unauthored, not meant to be read –
or merely hurrying by, a forgotten promise?
Translations from the English 