these things on the wind

There are mornings when I come here
and I want to post nothing more than a period
.



or maybe a comma
,



would be more fitting

since I'm thinking that it's a pause I'm looking for
,
,
,
,



a dip into nonsense
and nothing more.



a notice that it's okay
to dabble in
poetry





So.
Today I'm doing
just that.
A comma
,


And this, in honor of April's national poetry month:






Wind in a Jar
-for Deborah Whitman

I had been thinking of Bosnians and Serbs,
another stupid slaughter in a world
I could not disavow as mine,
when in your studio you said
This is wind in a jar. I saw the white hint
of turbulence near the bottom
of an irregular rhombus---a jar
because you called it a jar---
and I could look right in at the fixed wind
and the mere air that surrounded it.
I was happy you had caught the wind,
which for centuries had been as reckless
as anyone angry and unattached,
happy you'd given in such a resting place.
I wanted you to make a jar
for certain dark sections of the heart,
and a jar for honesty that hurts,
and a jar open on all sides---a freedom jar---
that would hold only what wished to be held.
But I had to say goodbye, or once again get lost
in the flux and the effluvia of life and art.
Outside in the warm unauthorized night,
a small breeze had come up, a fledgling wind,
something that had gotten away, I was sure,
from somewhere, and would roam
the torturous earth for as long as it could.

-Stephen Dunn