A Farewell To Wind

apologies to E. H. "Blow, blow, ye western wind... Christ, that my love were in my arms and in my bed again" Once she hated it, like Hemingway's Catherine hated rain, (I see myself dead in it). Now, she sits in solitude at the gentle offspring that sidles, nay, croons, around the corners of a porch. Quietude is in its whispered wisdom, filtering insight into occluded childhood: Northeast ogre storms that belted the beach, blew stinging sheets of sand, formed salt-spit scum onto bedroom windows to blind a child who sought clarity. Now, in lieu of sea oats, a crepe myrtle blooms full-out. Skeletal in winter is an asymmetry she loved, as in Ernest's "stark black sculptures" of winter trees on walks in his Paris neighborhood, but the blossoming myrtle lifts an abandoned nest, its purpose a 'fait accompli", the babies flown like her own. Beach lore did not prepare for how spring would bring empurpled flowering cones, leafy branches returning the beauty, the familiar music of birthing, here, in the eighty-first summer of her life. "Eighty-one," asks the wind? "It's just a number..." The myrtle undulates, rustles, speaks of passages with leaf-language that needs no interpreter. An assurance of long lifetimes. Fastened as they are, they can bend and sway, giving signs of grace that say, we can change, We can change