No longer believing in wind, I wrote this
because I grew up in an area where the wind almost never
stopped.
But it occurred to me that even so, things
managed to settle down onto and into the earth
even in South Central Kansas, which is damn near Oklahoma.
It's scary.
The poem is called no longer believing in wind.
From the airborne dust, we learn alliances.
At the most unlikely moments, we to settle
among the veins of old leaves, cozy
into the corners of unsung barns.
Less solvent than snow, we fill the hollows of our forebears
those slow rocks of the fields.
Our flights, our fancies no more enduring
than the movements of small wings.
Always there's the pull of something
deeper than our thrust, of something loftier
even than our wild propulsion.
And so it is we find ourselves reduced to birth.
Brother to brother descended in league
with the center of the earth.
[APPLAUSE]
People out here never get any wind,
you don't know what it is.