Invisible, the wind came off the high mountain peaks, cold and crisp as water from the glacier, and poured down the divide and over the foothills in torrents, mingling as it went with the desert air east of the range, stirring up dust devils and clouds, raising the earth from the earth and carrying it a few miles east, only to set it down again.

Wet over the prairies, drying; dry over the fields, moistening. The wheat fields of North Dakota stretch forever, from one horizon to another, but still the sea of air is larger, and its waves impress themselves upon the green stalks, green currents through the evening grain which you can follow with your eye, trace with your finger, and draw to your lips like a drop of scented water, to slake your thirst for beauty. Then the wind passes on — it leaves you behind. There you stand, your heart racing with youth, creating a memory, a record of the moment here and now in your early years, a record of the invisible that moves a over the face of the earth. The wind sighs away to the east, and in the sense of being filled and being emptied, nascent understanding that every moment and every scent and every touch reels out the lineage of your own story, prose and poetic as it is, true and retouched as it is.

~

My friends say they do not understand my words; but they try too hard. Sometimes words are a line of meanings, a textbook instruction, a flat page: "There was wind on the prairie; the fields of wheat were waving; I felt the wind on my face". Most often, though, it is not the tongue, but the heart that speaks with its sinuous melodies, and the body, whose secrets cannot be uncovered by force, merely received when the fist we close against the incomprehensible is loosened, and an open palm is waiting. An open palm allows sense without sensibility, lets go of what is known, allows mystery.

~

The wind as it left the fields carried with it the smell of the earth — and if the smell of the earth is there, is the earth not carried in its folds? — and the taste of the grain so that, should you stand in the drive of your suburban home, late on a summer evening, and feel that invisible wave pour over you, if you allow yourself to drown in that ocean of night-air, if you become a childhood memory instead of grasping for childhood, why, you will be the child, and not the aging man or woman wishing the child had not gone.

Under the arch of the centenary elms the wind surges and subsides tonight, washing everything into tomorrow's sunrise, onto the eastern shore. It will precede me to the coast, and fill the land and the sky with the essence of these heartlands, waiting for me.