November 12, 2012

Late last night it rained, softly, mostly thin and hard to hear, but making the trees shine with reflected light.  The sky so thick with clouds nothing could be seen, no moon, no stars, just street lights and occasional head lights sending lances of white through the dark.  Early this morning, it was still cloudy but things were starting to break up, the front had pushed through trailing a lot of wind behind like a long rumbling train.  Now there is a high blank blue sky, with not a single hint of a cloud and the wind still drying things out, shifting through the branches, tearing newly turned leaves from twigs and scattering them across the fading grass.  The sunshine will heat the air up quickly so that it will be nearly 80 by the end of today, though it will feel like a lot less because of the chilly wind.  Because there was so little rain, and not much has fallen since the end of July, the weather watchers think we may be slipping back into drought.  I sincerely hope not, but it does seem we are in a dry pattern, that even when we get rain it's so paltry it hardly waters anything but the surface.

It's so strange . . . after looking all day for a poem and not finding one, I stumble on this one in a file of poems I sent several years ago, and only read it because of the title, The Runes, that seemed mysterious and kind of forward looking.  So here is the poem I found for today complete with wind and remembrance . . .

The Runes, the Brute Remedies

        1
Leaves down, and day down, and mercury
At home in the cold measure,
In the buried bulb.

All afternoon, a low shoal of clouds
Rippled across the sky,
Flow of hearsay on the westering waters.

It's a long fall from the roadside sumac
With its burnt blooms,
The rusty oaks, the tree of heaven cast out,

And a far stretch to the milkweed, and lilies
On their tall stalks,
Barefoot ambitions in the air.

We open the book of oblivion, the runes
Of ruin, thumbed over
In the end time,

Almanac of snow from the moon, season
Of the blood sacrifice,
A good month

To screw the lid down tight on words
Preserved in vinegar,
Pickled in the brine of our own sweat.

        2
Veterans Day, and the flags stiff, the halyards rattling,
A breeze blowing hard from
No man's land—

In memory, we perfect the dead,
Fetish and relic
In the brittle ministry of the mind.

And then the sun cuts through November
Hazing the gray, a blade
Cleaning itself in the lover's wound,

And we suck in the rumors of breath,
The light
Infinity wastes on our tired faces,

Fire with nowhere to cling but the broken
Branches in the grate,
As if that mattered to us now,

As if we were not summoned to the dark
By our own dumb voices—
Hush of shadow, threshold of stone.

Elton Glasser

A breeze blowing hard from no man's land --  and it is, who can own this wind?  Certainly I can't, it does not stay, but rushes on to some other land where it still can't be owned.  We get the flow of hearsay, the water of the bay rough and running out into the Gulf, shallow water bullied by the wind into retreating.  All the chimes clashing together, from almost every direction as the wind swirls and shoves deep into the shrubs and the cane.  I don't so much feel summoned to the dark on this very sunny day, but summoned to the shadow of memory, the runes written on the wind that seem to be saying everything and nothing at once.  I suppose that what is inside us does its own listening, hearing whatever song it can or will, the wind can be made to say anything.  What do you want it to say?  What can it tell you of where it's been and where it's going?   I am content in the sunshine, in the elegant sound of chimes, and the rough growl of the bay.