July 31, 2015

A Wind

 

A wind came up out of the dark

that undid everything, there was nothing

left untouched, no end to its undoing.

And then it changed, it became

a wind that made nothing happen,

for a time longer than time itself,

nothing happened. There was

nothing the wind could touch

and nothing the wind could not

touch that happened, and those

things that had happened

and were already undone

were joined by those things

that did not happen, and together

they let go of happening and not happening,

of having happened and no longer happening,

and breathed a sigh. It was a sigh

that was a sign of something great,

something maybe even good,

or even greater than good,

so that years after nothing in the nothing

that was born of the nothing a people

were born who made a god of the good

and the greater than good, and they sighed.

They knew they came from nothing and so

their future seemed secure. It would be

as it always had been, they told themselves,

and each other, and their children’s

children’s children. And it was;

a world of the most competent relief,

created by an undoing wind.

 

 

 

 *****

 

Stone in Stone

 

Someone’s sitting on the ground.

Head bent, not touristing the harsh

landscape of rubble and stone,

he finds it curious how one hand

encloses the other, how the cause of scars

is not remembered, much less forgotten,

how his life must have been held in some

fashion by these hands without his knowing

what part they played, if any, what use

they provided, if any, or anything else

about them. “And these are only my hands,”

he says out loud. “The rest of me is complete

mystery.” The sun on his neck does not warm,

it imprisons like the flat edge of a steel blade

pressing obedience into his spine. No matter.

No birds wheel above, no lizards flit close

and bow below. Beneath a beating sun,

he sits at peace like a netsuke baking

on the shelf of earth, tucked into the shadow

his body makes, slowly being turned to stone.

 

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