wind

Wind

We live our lives in the Aeolian zone

                                    Windswept:

                        The Story of Wind and Weather

                                    Marq De Villiers

…the wind/was history and its filthy sweep…

                        “The Vietnam birthday Lottery, 1970”

                                    Marianne Boruch

How exactly are the chosen chosen?  Is it all random ball

slides down a chute of a wheel dropped before the show

and dented on one side, and the bag of balls

dropped too so that one rolls out under the chair

(it will be found when the building’s demolished

and the marked cards will always have that

vacant space) and how the spin seems to favor

the dent.  I tell you no one notices, no one

from the crowd, certainly not the woman who's hand is

next to the hand turning the wheel next to the dent
because they’ve got their own thing, fingers

creeping to fingers while the money turns into

the small hurricane of chance.

Only this morning I knew I needed a new biography

and there’s not a lot of time really so I pulled

and put back, pulled and put back—and chose

one on the wind—I know right? but there it is

and I’m intrigued not because I can see the wind—who can—

but like everyone else I see what floats in it from time

to time.  I see who bends almost double into it

to get out of it, and I read about it in this gentle quiet

room on the second floor of a house I’ve lived in

for ten years—a house that’s tucked out of the wind—

so unlike the house I grew up in, when every little draught

would wind—ha, that’s funny, through the cracking

plaster and like a small Pentecost float above me

in a dust, I saw it once, that outside, late in spring,

would be pollen, a yellow float drifting by like any

calm parade.

and wouldn’t you know it the poet, now this is random

right, talks about wind and the way we cup a flame to keep it

from going out and she says this when everyone is

waiting for that announcement, the lottery of who’s going

and who’s not, and though she doesn’t say in this poem, the who

turning the wheel is smelling the cleavage of the assistant

as it wafts up in the breeze the wheel makes and his hand

slips off the ball so he grabs another one—and oh

but the wind, they both said it, the wind blows.