Wind Came Down From Distant Hills

Winter Snowscape

The Wind and the Dead

James Hart 

I love the wind in daily words,
not sirocco, chinook, or zephyr,
the antic moods of elder gods,
but breeze, gale, and little sigh,
words of storm and vocal time
moving trees’ lithe living arms.
I love the color of the wind,
endless blue of rhyming sky.
I love the breeze that lifts
the cool of rain and runs it
over the still flesh of morning,
the gale uncaving the night’s
hairless beast of snow and ice
shrieking evil in your ears,
the lingering replies of sighs
happily lost in moonlight
when it answers only you.
I love the wind’s vagrant soul
easing into empty houses,
looking into missing mirrors,
shards of long lost windows
cutting silence, ghosts of dust,
tracks of mice across a snow,
a rime of shadows over you.
I love a black scavenger wind
pawing over hapless barns,
picking hay’s brittle bones,
lifting dark clouds of straw,
all signs that something large
awaits you out of sight, strong,
alive, and takes you in its arms,
presses your heart suggestively.
I love the wind’s timeless rhyme,
its long unvarying redundancies,
a soliloquy or an elegy, or you,
come down from sighing hills
so far away we forgot you left,
yet welcome you as hunters do,
scenting the blood of winter
rising nightly on the wind.


(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled In the Countryside of the Dead)