You hitch winds, never still, you who originate
in mountains, valleys of China’s northwest,
until grains of you, nanoscopic, reveal themselves,
colonizing California’s coast.
Wild currents buffalo you here, into New Mexico’s
high country, perhaps in tempo with torrents soaring
over the Pacific you rode and ride today. Do they
echo your leaps ceaseless into the stratosphere?
Could you brother to haze that obscures Rio Grande’s
valley, its half dozen mountain ranges greeting me
in first light’s calm clarity—before the skyline,
once volcanic, turns into a faceless blank wall?
Are you parcel of the particulate, bitter, invisible,
blading my eyes, hiding in distant corners of my lungs,
hanging on, even as my paroxysms seek to purge
your pestilent presence?
Would you, if you could, return to your igneous
birthscape, winds and waters that, over millennia,
began to sculpt you into nearly immeasurable
nothingness?
But not true nullity, since they endowed you wings
we poets seek to put in words, yet no matter
our magic, never scale your highest heights, or seas
on vessels of air.
Or alight safely, as you have, to take up new life,
to join me in Indian Country, until today’s gusts
inhale you skyward, eastward, curving over America,
the Atlantic and beyond.
Until wind wearies to stillness, as down you tumble,
earthly orbit done, like a star from the empyrean,
before the Taklamakan, to fete your return, cyclones you
once more into the clouds, for another century-long spin
around the planetary block.
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.
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