Meditation in the Open-Air Garage
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.
Copyright © 2021 by Carol Moldaw. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 9, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Carol Moldaw
Carol Moldaw is the author of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018), among other books. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.