THE WIND FROM SOMEWHERE?

Or GOD'S FAN




This high wind
will skin trees inside out.
Its hand
will part the gum trees like a barber
Looking for
loose limb-lengths to throw down

It will pick
up one improvident white-anted oak tree
And toss it
down for rot, even the solid branches will
Go down
the border like bodies after territorial war.

Anything loose
will be rocked till it breaks away.
Everything weak
be pulled from its thin belief stem
All that is
on the loose will be spun off into chaff.

This will be
on a day after the equinox, or a day else.
Neither flood,
nor yet a fire, just an increasing inflatus
Just a winding
wind to take that afflatus out our sails.

Then leaves
of our books will take to the sky as fast
As autumn’s y
ellowed poplars, the popular text on
Each page
will turn over and over in unread ozone.

Till this wind
eats the atmosphere, and throws down
The wires
powerless outside of the melodramas like strings
of a lolly puppet
blowing in a Judy-punched world.

And when the Some
where wind has spintered, has gathered
Has blown
our heaps and heaps of rubbish and rubbished it.
The where-going
wind will stay a little while as a fan…

for a flame.