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.