Reseda Wind

Our neighbor (a stranger, we are new
here, fresh from another hard-ocher valley
more

risky/cosmopolitan, though as baldly sunned)
warned us wind is rare summers.
Obviously

she is never homebound weekdays, 3-
ish, when (as if brewed in a pot made from heat
and

hide, then swung loose by an iron arm) wind arrives,
ripping down dried palm fronds like skirts from un-
suspecting

spinsters forever pathetically standing by;
leaf-trashing dervish be-
heading

non-native plants, snapping ribs of my simple shade
umbrella; wolf’s breath, hurting specific
treasures

cherished earlier, when my child and I played
so well. Chimes panic, dead-drop from the orange
tree

outside his modest bedroom’s window; my hair
is stolen from the weak clip; ox shoulders
clumsy

my watering of scorched bush and weed and I wonder:
where have we moved now, 13 miles closer to my sea
though

barely inching across basin scavenged by bored poets
(tattlers, thieves); odds-off country; even the shaggy
potato

vine’s tangled locks flung ruthlessly aside—the new grave’s
squat-rock headstone glaring, freed, reminder of the one
senseless

casualty of this change (O sacrifice, you who never knew, etc.).
And when it’s finished its donkey’s yawn over my yard, wind
reaches

for an outrage of thunderheads, rolling them peak-white
over sky pressed into a tryst with obscurity—one
un-

mined poetic scream summing up the rest
of this year’s ordinary calamities—
wind

vanishing, returning, breathing heat-shiny gems
I am stupid to dismiss: a child’s treasures, a death,
chimes,

my
own heat-cracked, silently spun headlines petrifying
in mid-summer’s heave.