The Shape of Moving
Someone traces the wind back to where it started,
back before the dinosaurs, and wins a big prize
and ends up committing suicide somewhere
out in the desert, which has been getting hotter
by the day. It’s where the wind ends, his note says,
and no one finds him for so long he’s been eaten
by insects and vultures — all but his bones
and cap, stained by his sweat — just enough
to identify his DNA. And as I’m reading his story,
the woman I love most in the world comes into
the kitchen and tells me her life has been wasted,
then looks out the window to marvel at the blooming
flowers no one has planted, the buzzing
bees no one has summoned. Yesterday
a neighbor stopped by to tell us the yellowjacket
wasps were swarming through the woods, stinging
every human they could find, and when we wondered
why they were so restive, he ventured a theory
that all the new houses were disturbing the soil
where the wasps hibernate, and he wondered if they thought,
somehow — if wasps think at all — that they might
sting us away? When he left, we packed up
a bottle of wine and some glasses and walked up
to the man-made lake at the edge of the woods
a mile or so away. We sat and watched the evening
blow across the water like a small bird might do
before landing in the trees on the other side, to sing.
And so we drank our wine and listened for a while,
then slowly walked back through the darkness.