White Wind
Listen,
just listen.
Intolerable with fusion,
the world is erupting into silence.
The wind and the ash have blasted
our town into white sleep
like Utrillo's Paris;
not so much blank and barren,
not so much cold
as blind and reflective.
You can feel it with your fingertips.
Close your eyes
and follow the streets
where they unroll like bandages;
travel them like traffic
in the veins of last autumn's leaves,
echo of the last cry
of the dead nestling
crushed at the foot of the red cathedral.
Ash, the salt
with no savor,
falls indiscriminate as death,
crusting the eye and the nostril,
scoring a curse
on the steel of the engine armature.
Ash torments the crevice,
tender junction of petal and sepal.
White powder twists
frail flames behind heels and wheels;
engraved gray with dust,
supine on the doorstep.
Close your eyes,
blink back tears,
just wait.
Wait and listen;
as it rasps your face to parchment
the white wind is grinning,
burning from ear to ear.
Non carpe diem,
don't seize the day:
the summer itself is a seizure;
the world and its death are so close at hand
that they blister the skin
and the words spit like flames
as they leap through the teeth.
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| photo by Carmen R. Andrews |
http://oregonpoeticvoices.org/poet/379/
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