2 poems
Ode to the Wind not in the Pindaric Mode
Something about the wind in winter blowing
through the not-there of a cold afternoon
the rush of it rising and falling stays
in the mind I don’t know how
it manages to be loud and quiet at the same time
it’s mysterious
today I can’t even hear the faint wash of highway traffic outside
my window which is the sound I use to tell myself that
the world still has some predictability to it and that it hasn’t yet
spun off its axis due to an overload of craziness although
in another way the thing we call routine is beyond appalling
O wind I need to apologize for
centuries and centuries of mythologizing
it’s just a sign of how ill-at-ease in the world we are
it’s easier see you as a symbol
than to accept your untranslatable freedom
I’ve listened to your various half-lives
sadness isn’t the right word for it
but it’s hard to disassociate sadness from the crystalline
thereness of being not-there
if you had a mind what word would you use for
a world we weigh down with intention
and many other kinds of heaviness
What We Do and in Doing Are Undone By
If the ships burned if the smoke was more than a funeral pyre
if heaven was not a sacred temple
if the walls did not fall and
trophylessness were the only true end—
this line this life would be an heroic simile that’d go on forever
how nothing is unusual once it happens
that anything can be an occasion
the only wonder is that we still wonder
to the ancients what was extraordinary was not the actions
of gods, but those of humans
just so did the gleam from the polished bronze of their armor
flash through the whole sky, up to the very heavens
they didn’t say “war” they said they “made love
to their swords” Simon Weil
tonight roughly three and a half wars after
your wars with the wind dying down
and the darkness complete and the big military chopper
thrumming the night air overhead as it finishes its rounds
I’m thinking of your life
under strange stars and all the forces
that pushed you from state to state
and not least the force of your understanding of force “it
is that x that turns
anybody who is subjected to it
into a thing” and as if uttered by the angel of history
swept away and blinded by the very force
it imagined it could handle
Jon Thompson’s fourth and most recent book is Notebook of Last Things (Shearsman Books, 2019). His poetry has appeared widely in journals such as American Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Common, and The Iowa Review. In addition to writing poetry and essays, he edits the single-author poetry series, Free Verse Editions and Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics. For more on his work, go to www.jon-thompson.com