tangle

Tangle – Mark Schultz

If you could sing the wind, your voice should wear a sighing sound, as if from distant sources you had flown, and half-way through your flight your wings were weary but not yet done. Or a whistling of time through the sieve: divided into strands that strain then stream in parallel until they tangle, intertwine, and fuse together once again. What else would it seem? Is it winter round the windows moaning ancient love’s lament, a loss remembered making sadness modern, soon to be spent? Is it wind that carries moonlight lightly on its back, depositing in drops of dew the dawn that trees and flowers rush to drink?

If you could speak the wind, I trust the tales it tells (would be as much the future as the past, and in so being, just like you or me): the body pauses on a road it did not choose, but wandering grew accustomed to, with all the scents and sounds of other lands alive within its inner folds, the recesses that can’t be guessed or plumbed, surrendering their cargo to an open hand, a sleepy head, a children’s bed, or a nightbird’s silent wing. I would hear that tale. I listen even when not paying heed; then, something far away takes root in me, and grows me up and out of this small shell, this fair game, toward a brighter prospect and a bigger sky — even if I grow through pain, through so much I have never seen that I misplace my name, thank heaven, and gently (as a man who walks mile after mile, a battered hat upon his head, at last, when the sun is leaking from the sky, and evening is approaching, he takes that tattered straw and sets it on the verge, with almost-reverence, at least as friends, and thanks it for the rays of noon reflected, the rains of summer deflected) lay assumed self on the grass, say a few words (spoken by the wind) and finally, finally let it pass.

If you could see the wind, in its woven-thread complexity, as strands of smoke fan out and curl back in, or clouds appear then dissipate again, would it be to glimpse unfathomed realms, or simply one more way to spell your name? Whether you sing or speak or see, it all is much the same to me; and whether wind, or weather’s own refrain, the echo of your name, the sigh of passing time; the hymn of hands rejoined and fingers found and shared, or, independent, folded as in prayer; the lyric of the land, the loss of moonlight welcome dawn, the inner folds of body and of mind, the cargo in an open hand, the prospect of a beckoning sky, straw and sun, grass and wind, all bend together to make the shape we’re in.

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