What the Wind Said to Me When I Awoke from Another Nightmare in Which My Father Had Died, Alone

I was there with him in the darkness of your dream, was his breath, was the frayed scarf of it, the shivering white dust of it,

was the moist cobweb across his mouth, was the last vapor of life curling into a whistled sound, a word repeated—something like face and soul, or fast and silly, like fist hitting soil, like fish thrashing in the jaws of seal— a name, a name. Yours. You

should have been there too, with me, strumming the black etchings of his face, his palms, letting your fingertips quell the scorch of skin, freeing me to braid my howling immateriality into the thready blare of the trumpet, to become the bridge between worlds, become the emblazoned quiver of horizon as the sun rises to no chorus.

*

In the village, where I found your father lying in bed, his head turned toward Mecca, his hands folded across his belly, posing already for the grave. He said sing. But the songbird beneath his window refused. Silence reigned, broken by rain, the rumble of electric sky. The future’s grim shadow cast itself into the dream, falling across his body like the gnarled limb of an ancient tree.

Other winds blew. Rain, so much rain.

*

Perhaps, then, it was pity which moved me to kiss his forehead and massage away the swelling of his splintered feet, wail sweetly in his ears to keep the crush of songlessness at bay as the waters rose around him—

to pretend that I was you as the current tore him away from this world, from me.

*

Without you, songbird: woodswallow, magpie, bulbul, goldfinch, oriole, crow, whatever—

without his oldest, the only child privy to the torture of his secret griefs, the way his kin stole the most delicious pulp of his life, leaving only the rinds, as glorious and as golden as rinds can be,

the way he offered up even these nothings when they came back and he had no more to give, leaving his children, their mother, wondering after their own share,

the way he loved most the ones who caused him the most suffering—

alone, he bit his lip until the taste of blood reminded him of your absence, because you had wounded him by demanding he be a father, nothing else.

He hated that you took pride in your violence.

*

When he asked me, the wind, what my name was, I gave yours. What right did I have to deny a dying man’s wish when to fulfill it would give me, the nothingness that I am, a father?

By now blind, he believed I was you when I folded myself at his feet, called him Daddy, and wept as I expanded like a tempest to fill the room, to obliterate the world, as only a man’s son can.

Then he smiled, knowingly, saying into me, as he passed on,

  Yes, yes, yes     —to what, I cannot say, but perhaps you, awake now, with your ill father still alive, and material, already know the answer, and perhaps you can mouth it in song or sigh, in prayer or embrace, in caw or coo.

*

I am, if not you, then your dearest friend, your brother, burning to carry your voice, your supplication, every note and knot of it, down this mountain, across the flooded valley, through fields of wheat and corn, through an endless pummel of rain, across the great plains of silence and time, beyond the shores of language, beyond the void from which every wind is born, some as sighs, some as swells, as storms, as silence.

I am a wind born of such silence, and that man with empty hands, he is my father now.

Whatever you can give, while you still have time left in which to give, give.