Our neighbor (a stranger, we are new
here, fresh from another hard-ocher valley
more
risky/cosmopolitan, though as baldly sunned)
warned us wind is rare summers.
Obviously
she is never homebound weekdays, 3-
ish, when (as if brewed in a pot made from heat
and
hide, then swung loose by an iron arm) wind arrives,
ripping down dried palm fronds like skirts from un-
suspecting
spinsters forever pathetically standing by;
leaf-trashing dervish be-
heading
non-native plants, snapping ribs of my simple shade
umbrella; wolf’s breath, hurting specific
treasures
cherished earlier, when my child and I played
so well. Chimes panic, dead-drop from the orange
tree
outside his modest bedroom’s window; my hair
is stolen from the weak clip; ox shoulders
clumsy
my watering of scorched bush and weed and I wonder:
where have we moved now, 13 miles closer to my sea
though
barely inching across basin scavenged by bored poets
(tattlers, thieves); odds-off country; even the shaggy
potato
vine’s tangled locks flung ruthlessly aside—the new grave’s
squat-rock headstone glaring, freed, reminder of the one
senseless
casualty of this change (O sacrifice, you who never knew, etc.).
And when it’s finished its donkey’s yawn over my yard, wind
reaches
for an outrage of thunderheads, rolling them peak-white
over sky pressed into a tryst with obscurity—one
un-
mined poetic scream summing up the rest
of this year’s ordinary calamities—
wind
vanishing, returning, breathing heat-shiny gems
I am stupid to dismiss: a child’s treasures, a death,
chimes,
my
own heat-cracked, silently spun headlines petrifying
in mid-summer’s heave.