The Rising of the Wind
Poems by
Barbara Riley
ISBN: 0-930829-52-2. $15
Order: amazon.com
Force 3: Gentle Breeze
A wind in force quickens the blood, ties
silence to health and sleep to peace—
random questions to rising flood. The hollow surprise
of death squatting, a fat toad under a flower pot, eyes
slick with anticipation, waits. My heart begins to race.
A wind in force quickens the blood, ties
trees to fire, to the terror coming, a wind that tries
a thousand ways to build, herding clouds, raising seas—
driving random questions to rising flood and the hollow surprise.
Sleeping now, do you rest as opiates take each cell in sighs?
Or only sip a sleep of death-delayed in this unnatural release,
as wind in force, unseen, quickens the blood, ties
sweetness to a phrase, a look—glacial memory an uncertain vise
to hold love high in the tree with the newly unguarded fleece.
Can it be random this rising flood, the hollow surprise?
Where does the wind come from? The koan lies—
What is living, you know this, what is living, dies.
So a wind in force quickens the blood, ties
Random questions to rising flood, a final hollow surprise.
Osip
The memorized shape
and the wolf’s long lope
the reddening leaf
shudders—wait, the fall
colored stride covers
broken grass, fingers of shale
a heart beating in orbit
races light for weight,
sound for time, a cleaved
fret; music of winter
to come, notes picked and held,
red finger-tips forget to write.
A heart gone mad,
poems frozen stuck to the wall
of wind circling a cold hell,
a present striped with power.
The memorized shape
the wolf’s long lope
a whitening glacier creeps over
fretted claw of a maple leaf
tumbled slowly to the valley floor.
Tens of thousand years pass,
your voice in my ear, hushed but true,
your life in my breath, alive.
•
A Summer Without Rain
1
One morning rain broke
like a sheet of glass.
No drops speckled the deck,
only skylights rang
a stony patter, and then
another day simmered into
staggering heat—drought
setting out fire bait
to catch racks of lightning.
2
This morning the cold has come
remembering to rain
all night long, dripping aloud,
patting the stricken earth.
Sheets lap against piñon’s ragged
bark, sliding to the ground as gray silk
falls, as heart-stopping as what it reveals.
Smells erupt. Hope lingers long enough
to be caught drenched in laughter.