It says here that men are thirteen times more likely
to get struck by lightning than women.
You can wear a metal hair claw and that might
bring you up to speed with the males.
You can be fingering a hinge be-
tween this world and the next and it might turn out
to be a great vehicle for dying.
Or rush to a doorframe with no reference points
as an earthquake makes waves in
terra firma and still spin off if a tornado
dislodged it all instead.
“Stable” is only a word with a roof that can collapse
off with a snake sidewinding out of the initial story.
They put a gag order on the weather forecasters not
to say “global warming”.
With the movie soundtrack from
“The Decline And Fall of Western Civillization”
playing on the stereo,
we sit in the car, eyes pressed beyond the wind-
shield with spacecraft X,
Musk’s rocket, shooting through the coastal sky
from Santa Barbara, not knowing what it is yet.
The rip in the sky is alien-exciting, weird
frequencies skirting the earth.
It seems sacrelige to forage for meteorites
with metal detectors, or entertain other hobbies,
while a hurricane is approaching landfall in Florida
yet again.
And my friend there, almost native, is ready to
strip down to nothing,
face the wave crash singing
while a smoking cigarette dangles from his lips

Wind-Singers

Its not mine, what visited me
in hypnagogic reverie on
the Dine` reservation.
In a pitched tent there is only a thin
fabric between you and the elementals.
There the wind is pumping
through the stars, the ears, and
everything in between.
It’s not the resonant lonely song
of the coyotes,
or someone walking by your
tent in another language,
after the big fire has burned low.
Its not Violet or one of the other women
weaving, tamping down the weft,
a sure and certain whisper that anchors
what’s left of wisdom to the red earth
where some placentas were buried
and the Sundance tree was raised up.
Not the communal drum,
that pumping outward heart.
It’s the wind-singers,
a kind of ghost spirit
that someone told me about,
after it happened.

© Amy Trussell.

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