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  FOR RESTON

  more rough, less blue, more lit, and patternless

  COURTSHIP

  —Both things, I think. But less the hesitation of many hands

  touching the stunned dethronement of the master’s body, than

  their way of touching it again; again. Each time, more surely.

  SWIMMING

  Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for

  Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when

  the coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always

  owned the place and had come back inspecting now

  for damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History

  here means a history of storms rushing the trees

  for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star—

  worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,

  steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do

  people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything

  in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s

  suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or

  I understand it should, which is meant to be

  different, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure

  Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land

  a ship foundering at sea, though more and more

  it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love

  the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms

  the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just

  above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind

  parts of those questions from which I half wish

  I could school my mind, desperate cargo,

  to keep a little distance. An old map from when

  this place was first settled shows monsters

  everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still

  feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness

  itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and

  I the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.

  BROTHERS IN ARMS

  The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,

  something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about

  happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable

  was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’ve

  learned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s living

  alive still, maybe just

  a while longer. Ghost bamboo that

  the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color

  of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when

  I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thought

  gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made,

  however painfully, to see this life more up close. The higher

  gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser

  do the best they can—so a friend I somewhere along the way

  lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before

  passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must

  surely, by now, be dead. There’s a rumored

  humbling effect

  to loss that I bear no trace of. It’s not loss that humbles me.

  What used to look like memory—clouds for hours breaking,

  gathering, then breaking up again—lately seems instead

  like a dance, one of those slower, too-complicated numbers

  I never had much time for. Not knowing exactly what it’s

  come to is so much different from understanding that it’s come

  to nothing. Why is it, then, each day, they feel more the same?

  MEDITATION: ON BEING A MYSTERY TO ONESELF

  The oars of the ship called Late Forgiveness lift,

  then fall. The slaves at the oars

  have done singing—it’s pure work, now.

  The galley master stands as always, whip in hand,

  but for the moment

  in idleness. They say when discipline

  dreams, it’s just the one dream: hands

  breaking from stillness, like hands of course, but like

  hands when, having lost a thing entirely, they move

  entirely by definition. The ship

  moves slowly. It’s a ship. It’s a storm-beclouded

  stronghold

  in the dark, receding. They say discipline’s flag

  is blue—three deer in flight; three stars

  barely show, above them.

  MUSCULATURE

  The last dog I owned, or—more humanely put, so

  I’m told—that I used to live with, she’d follow me

  everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s

  more the truth. It is the truth. And now

  this dog—that

  I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty,

  like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s

  taken me, just to half understand that. Pretty much my

  whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness

  like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it

  still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably,

  gets stripped away: What hope, otherwise, for suffering?

  When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay

  inside of, I’m not saying

  forever, I could last a fair time

  on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I

  pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose

  command through a summer garden. Let those plants

  that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.

  GIVINGLY

  —So here we are again, one-handedly fingering

  the puckered edges of the exit wounds

  memory leaves behind, he said, and he tossed

  his leash made of stars, then tightened it,

  around the antlers it seems I forget, always,

  about having. Smell of nightfall when it

  hasn’t settled yet. Insatiability and

  whatever else hidden behind the parts

  that hide it. Surely any victim—sacrificial

  or not—deserves better, I thought, him leading me

  meanwhile toward the usual place, the branches

  grow more givingly apart there, as if to say

  Let pass. The wind was clean. The wind

  was a good thing, in his hair, and across our faces.

  THE DISTANCE AND THE SPOILS

  Half a life; a life … So much turns out to have

  been neither history nor memory, that mirage

  of history, in which I want you came at least

  briefly close. Sometimes

  disclosure’s a pretty

  flower, and that’s the end of it. S
ay he lifted

  himself slow, rose unsteadily up, sleep-or-

  dream-staggered out into black of night, non-

  choiring of crickets with their sounds that we

  call song, fall or don’t, speed—for a change—of

  not falling, what became

  of that? Sometimes

  we want a thing more than we can admit we

  want that thing. Invisible leaves toss like water;

  the eyes shut, or they turn away, as from the four

  bright points of a constellation missed earlier,

  and just now seen clearly: pain; indifference;

  torn trust; permission. Rest. Lean against me.

  NOT THE WAVES AS THEY MAKE THEIR WAY FORWARD

  Like Virgil, Marcus Aurelius died believing that his triumphs,

  when pitched against his failures, had come to very little.

  I don’t know. Given the messiness of most lives (humble,

  legendary, all the rest in between)—their interiors,

  I mean—it’s hard to say he was wrong. Black night. Black

  train. Freight of worries. Things that stay

  the same. Having reached that point that even

  the luckiest sometimes never get close to, where

  desire at last offers nothing more—nor less—than

  what restraint can, Marcus Aurelius wrote down

  some thoughts meant apparently only for himself, though

  they became Meditations, a book without which, by now,

  he’d pretty much be forgotten. It begins with gratitude.

  How it ends is painful, if I’m remembering right. But it isn’t pain.

  GOLD LEAF

  To lift, without ever asking what animal exactly it once belonged to,

  the socketed helmet that what’s left of the skull equals

  up to your face, to hold it there, mask-like, to look through it until

  looking through means looking back, back through the skull,

  into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be,

  that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming,

  to know utterly what you’ll never be, to understand in doing so

  what you are, and say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair.

  SEVERAL BIRDS IN HAND BUT THE REST GO FREE

  Hiking the restored prairie was more than lovely enough—

  I could appreciate the good signage; got a chance to forget,

  for a change, to respect fear … Were they happy in any

  real way, whatever real is, those first

  pioneers? The happiest

  people I know are those whose main strategy has

  always been detachment. I’ve been working on that. Not so

  long ago, for example, a sentence like “The skin where you

  burned me last week with your cigarette has almost healed

  completely”

  was so much harder to say. Progress. The way

  bluestem, mallow, purple globes of clover, when said

  together, make a kind of music, though they’re nothing alike,

  pale colors in a tall field—

  all a prairie comes to. True pity,

  as in deeply felt—I save mine, what’s left of it, for

  the wounded animals, the ones not yet dead. Already I don’t

  mean, anymore, the soft dark violent rustling wilderness

  inside the bright one that I was before, when I say wilderness.

  STRAY

  When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more

  than terms—how they can matter, suddenly—I can tell

  he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like

  when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy

  likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed

  to fail—that the body is—keeps me almost steady, if

  steadiness is what a gift for a while brings—feathers, burst-

  at-last pods of milkweed, October—before it all fades away.

  Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and

  restraining orders and the eventual Go fuck yourself get your

  ass out of here don’t go, the apartments across the street

  were a boys’ grammar school—before that, a convent,

  the only remains of which, ornamenting the far parking lot,

  is a marble pedestal with some Latin on it that translates as

  “Heart of Jesus, have mercy,” as if that much, at least, still

  remained relevant, or should. If it’s true that secrets resist

  always the act of telling, how come secrets, more often than

  not, seem the entire story? Caladium, cleome—how delicate,

  this holding of certain words in the mouth, the all-but-lost

  trick of lifting for salvage the last windfalls as, across them,

  the bees make their slow-muscled, stunned, moving scab …

  REVOLVER

  His face was a festival. Inside it,

  as if helplessness remained

  one of the few things left worth

  fretting for, making some kind of

  show of, whatever lies

  half between, he turned,

  kept turning … Above him, leaves

  swam the air—so it couldn’t have been

  past November. Most animals, smelling

  death on another, back away,

  as if repulsed, or frightened; the rest

  come closer. It was

  like that, then less so. His face

  was a festival, within which—just as

  tenderness is only sometimes

  weakness, or how what we were

  can become unrecognizable to what we are,

  or think we are—leaves swam the air.

  THE DARK NO SOFTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE

  How I say it happened

  may not be how it happened. In that slum

  that the mind lately feels like, I’m walking as if

  forever toward where the chestnut trees flanking

  the brokenly lit boulevard—what’s

  left of it—come now to a point, now

  to the never-to-be-reached conclusion I suspect

  they’ve meant all along. It’s a slum, but the sea

  hugs it as it does so many places prettier, emptier

  of such distractions as fear and at least the more

  galvanizing varieties of sorrow, hence the not-so-muffled

  crashing of waves not far from here: blue dart,

  shattered crossbow … Keeping it all somehow differently alive,

  and close, that’s the point, someone told me once—

  who? and the point of what? The less I understand myself,

  the more I understand others, which I used to think wasn’t

  saying much, but there are nights it can seem as good a road as any

  maybe toward compassion, even if half

  washed away—the road, I mean; not compassion. I don’t know

  how the better parts between two people become the first forgotten.

  FROM A BONFIRE

  There’s plenty I miss, still, that I wouldn’t want back—

  which I’m beginning to think might be all regret’s ever had

  to mean, and there’s maybe no shame, then, in having

  known some and, all these years, I’ve pretty much

  been wrong. Not that being wrong means wasting time,

  exactly. What hasn’t been useful? Having grown up with

  bonfires each October, having equated them with fall,

  the communion especially of leaves falling, fire as

  what both defined the dark—easily taken for granted—

  and kept the dark at bay, surely that’s been worth

  something, for it stays with me; in that way, it even now

  marks a difference between who I was and wha
t I’ve

  since become: a kind of bonfire myself—unattached,

  though, to any time of year in particular, instead

  a season of the mind entirely, as unpredictable

  in occurrence as in intensity, cracked, blue,

  forever half done departing, not so different

  after all, maybe, from the darkness against which

  I’m at once more apparent and somehow more

  betrayed. What has restlessness been for, the darkness

  asks, as if that were the question, when the darkness

  itself is its own question, the most honest one left,

  as far as I can see, that’s worth asking, that I keep

  meaning to ask, then faltering, not at all out of fear,

  I think—I don’t think I’m afraid—but being fire, and restless.

  AND LOVE YOU TOO

  When he describes a spear passing

  through the throat of some otherwise

  bronze-protected warrior, part of what Homer

  means is death, and there’s a piece that isn’t,

  the way black can resemble more a brightness

  sometimes, or how wind can vacillate

  between being a force bearing down

  on a field and what, for a time at least, from

  beneath, gives

  or seems to give to the field

  some agency … For the gods in Homer, there’s an

  at once lovely and less-than-lovely

  patterning to the brutality that, even as

  they wield it, is only theirs to borrow; Fate

  stakes the final claim, as if forever breaking

  ground for an imagined city from which

  the idea is that a vast empire like a fist opening

  fans out

  eventually across all things divine

  and mortal. Just as softly as the face,

  when the body’s sleeping, returns to childhood,

  Closer, deeper, says the hole in history

  we call the mouth of Homer because it

  helps, to name. Not the song that fog-muffled

  bells make, after storm. Nothing winged and lost,