a wind from the north, the sky is clear
| last night I had to close the window, woke up shaking, dreaming ice in a frozen ocean shifted around my bed, that I ran barefoot on a glacier; found the blanket thrown, I was naked in the dark with the first northern night, as it breathed frost into my room |
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| and this morning I swept a few early leaves from my step, sweet maple red, under a sky turned cool, the color of a clean December lake, thinking so it was no dream. there was a letter fallen in my box, my friend in Indonesia asking another fifty I don’t have, she the grandmother whose shoulders like dried sticks no longer carry water from the river. “how is your job?” she writes. “I am almost well again.” she needs the water pump most, but today the poor can spare nothing for the poor. I tell her, “my bills are never paid, in America, the wealthiest nation. I am glad to hear your heart still speaks to you.” I carried the broom to the upstairs closet, knowing leaves would be falling all the next week, the maple gone, last of the elm, mountain ash, the two oaks. |
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| when noon came and the wind came down from the north with its sharp teeth, I was in the street where screaming oh god help me a woman lay on the pavement, was dragged, two men into their car shouting quit lookin’, and we did, not knowing this woman to die for her, not like a sister, not family; doors slammed like fists against metal, the wheels’ scream longer, a curse, the sneer of the city, around the corner, I ran safely after, saw no plates, no police, no neighbor, let my anger shape itself in words, one more swallowed sound, one more inch my heart squeezed smaller as the abduction disappeared; I stood with my brother and as the cry rang like electricity in our heads he whispered what we did not wish to think: she’s still out there somewhere. |
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| there is this wind from the north; I stand against it, both hands raised to hold it back, discovering a wind as wide as a nation, wide as the world, a tongue lashing out quit lookin’ as one woman dies carrying water, another because I did not know her name. |
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| so I have folded newspaper into all the windows, worked extra hours for oil for the furnace, put in a supply of candles, washed the wool coat. it’s all I can do, and I know it’s not enough, the dream of cold still huddled in my walls, waiting the decay of insulation, or the last drop of steam in the pipes, waiting for the earth to lean away from the sun, as it always does: I will wake up naked and alone, hands out, protecting nothing. |
“Shadow Cares” by Samuel Moulin @ DeviantArt.com
Poem originally published in The Great River Review, Red Wing, Minnesota, 1983
Postlogue
Before one or another of you start this “Oh, what a suburban mentality” rant – yes, I have heard it before – let me say that of -course- it is a suburban mentality. I grew up within the sort-of-safe walls of a beautiful and friendly neighborhood, with hard-working parents who spent years removing the hurts and struggles of their own pasts, so to pass as few of them along as possible; inside the sort-of-safe walls of the outlying towns, where mostly what hurt us was ourselves. The distance between those gardens and urban glass is the source of this poem.
Since then, of course, I have lived in or wandered through some of the less-affluent edges of Europe, Indonesia, Brasil, Minneapolis (they exist), and elsewhere abroad, where the first shock of physical insecurity – written above – was reworked as strength, some muscular resilience I didn’t know I could have; and the acknowledgement, if not acceptance, of a world that is none to gentle, particularly on those who haven’t been born into plenty.