Anatomy
I am a skeleton
Made from the sun
With canvas skin
And blood of wind
Like any tree:
But wind runs me,
My leaves slack
Until wind comes back,
Nature's manikin
Without the wind.
I never mind
The force behind.
I mill the field;
I reap the wind.
I only feel
In air's sharp steel.
In constant winds,
My laundry spins,
In canvas thrashes
My whole life flashes.
Let limbs mesh
Without wind's flesh,
Let arms twist
Without spoke's wrist:
The world's concealed
Unless we yield,
Lip's pale shell
Until words spell,
Eyes sealed
Until sun's wheeled.
Limbs take root
When eyes suit:
Skies kneel
To spine's keel;
Before blood swells,
Hollow wells:
No race
Without face.
What can bless
Unless,
What can mill
Until
Wind blends to stone,
Blade breaks to field,
Bones spill to vane,
Sails bend to shield:
Take no sides
Until wind decides,
Rise and fall
Until clouds crawl.
Skin is less
Without wind's dress.
Our bodies hurl
When rhythms whirl.
But courage fails
Until air sails,
Beds neat
Until sails sheet,
Blood still
Until vanes fill;
Nothing there
But rushing air.
Final face:
Empty space;
Short of breath,
No other death –
Short of sky,
We fall and die.
March 12th, 1988
Explanation
This is a poem about a windmill. It is also about the body's dependence on nature, and nature's dependence on our observation of it (or, to get picky, the dependence of our version of nature on our version of our vision of it).
It is further a poem about paradoxes, like a child's poetic riddle: "what am I?" but without one simple answer. The answer might be: I am a tree, or Ulysses at sea, Ulysses undecided, thinking about Penelope. My wife calls it "Ulysses meets Don Quixote." I wish I had that kind of clarity.
Windmills resist the wind, the way sails on a boat do. A boat advances out of resistance, or wheat is ground into flour. The tension between the structure of an axle and the chaos of a breeze produces something constructive.
Each couplet in the poem contains, I hope, some of that “paradoxical tension between rigidity and flow. Its up and down rhythm simulates a windmill's turning.
At a certain point, the body, dependent on the universe, begins to fight back and solipsize, or organize, the music of the spheres, as a boat makes sense out of uncertain breezes ("no race without face").
The poem is filled with obvious references to Ulysses, his sailing, his slaying of his wife's suitors, his resignation to and his defiance of both nature and his homecoming.
In the couplet "Wind blends to stone," structure and sense break down and chaos reigns. Wind turns the mill stone, mill blades rotate crops in a way by churning them into food, the rigid "bones" of the mill axle melt into fluid vanes or paddles turning in the breeze, and also blood shed in battle with Penelope’s suitors, boats sailing home to Ithaca. "Vanes" is used in a double sense.
Man needs a context to matter. In the exhilaration of wind, breath, blood, in accepting and enjoying nothingness, we inherit meaning.
As the world loses its natural spaces, poetry loses an imitative lushness. When we celebrate the ordinary, we lose the extraordinary, the epic. Words are less without wind's dress. The eye of the storm, of Ulysses, of man, of the mill, of the tree, is the id, the identity, the cervical cortex which, optimistically, lurks at the bottom of any poem.