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Meditation in the Open-Air Garage

Carol Moldaw

Leaves have no choice
but to articulate the wind:

aspens like zills, aglint and atilt;
the willow, a lone zither.

Riffling the cottonwoods at dusk,
winds find me cushioned against

the concrete in the open-air garage,
facing the trees, the drive, the road,

the mountains up the canyon’s
other side, until an onrush bellows

a mindless heartless ecstasy
through the empty sack of me.

Carol Moldaw is the author of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018), among other books. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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About this Poem

“Listening to the wind one evening, I was struck by how the character of the sound varied as it passed through different kinds of trees. I was riveted, transfixed, and began to feel light as a leaf that the wind was passing through. Through many attempts—drafts—I developed these couplets, that with their intricacies of consonance and assonance, are my way of voicing what I heard and felt listening to the wind.”
—Carol Moldaw

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More by this poet

Meditation on the Veranda

Bliss—right now:
beneath a blue jade
vine’s beaded bangs,

my sonar function
asleep, the I unstressed,
a syllable glided over.

(Except wherever
in the line it’s placed,
the I is stressed.)

Carol Moldaw

2020

Arthritis

"Save your hands,” my mother says,
seeing me untwist a jar's tight cap—

just the way she used to tell me
not to let boys fool around, or feel

my breasts: "keep them fresh
for marriage,” as if they were a pair

of actual fruit. I scoffed
to think they could bruise, scuff,

soften, rot, wither.

Carol Moldaw

2018

The Lightning Field, 6

6.
a patch of virga/a verse paragraph
slant marks/slashing the sky/silvered in a shaft
of sunlight/pellucid virgules marking time
and pitch in a run of silent recitativo
no skittering drops/no rivulets of rhyme
shearing off the windshield/dripping from eaves
from leaves/self-contained/this sheet of rain
evaporates/is throttled/bottlenecked
in the sky's throat/never nears/never
grazes/never wets/the tantalized ground
virginal downpour/suspended mid-fall
coitus interruptus/a phone call/a second
thought/a punctured tire/a pummeled breast
no/no/no/no/no
the milk/won't come/the seed/won't pl

Carol Moldaw

2003

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Meditation in the Open-Air Garage

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