Her northern friends go home when the heat builds
before the rain. Her place is here. Her one
visitor, in these hot months, is the wind
who knocks at her door, stands in the afternoon sun
and knocks and knocks. She doesn’t want him in,
yet his knock echoes in the vacancies
of her body. Finally, the kitchen door swings in
and she knows he is back, banging his hat
on his thigh to shake the dust. He rests one haunch
on the table and smiles to welcome himself. She hardly
looks at him and yet he talks unpausing
like the sheet that flaps outside the window.
As she knew he would, he tells her his life,
how he camped out like a goat in the thorny hills,
how nothing there had any give to it—
all rock and cactus closed in on itself.
As he stretches into a chair, his voice mimics
pleasure, and for a moment here in the early
evening, she thinks he might be the real wind,
the wind she remembers blowing off the lake
at home, smelling of fish and pitch. Perhaps
when she looks out in the morning, she will see,
where the road dips, the sumac and box elder
up to their ears in mist. She will carry the oars
down a spongy path to the dock, row out, the center
of all the circles, and dive in the clear water.
But now the wind coughs, and she sees him wipe
dust from the back of his hand. He is not what
she had in mind, this wind that swaggers like
the holy ghost blown in from Guanajuato.
He makes the right gestures, touching her sleeves
and her loose hair. He thinks he’ll stay the night.
In the morning, she finds dust everywhere—on sills,
on the tops of her shoes, in cracks between
glazed tiles. As she walks through the still house,
it billows up around her legs like mist
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