The Winds
In those days I desired love, or what I took for love—but I was helpless, I required chance to get me there, I thought of pollen: powerful, but needy of breeze or the belly-furze of a bee. The job that bore some friends from Oregon to a cypress-kneed and alligator-infested town in Louisiana. The compound possibilities for sexual pairing in any given community. These are the winds. The winds that carry our DNA through the air like milkweed. In a painting the people on either side of the boulevard are large and excited and various and full of that exuberance we call everyday life: but smaller yet approaching is the armor glint of marching troops as silver as sardines, in a current that’s bringing some change to all of these lives, and even to styles of painting: is what I said in the bar, intent on sounding irresistibly knowing. To some I was geeky; to some, oh-please-shut-up. But lovely others found me a dessert for the night worth circling around, and there were smoky snakes of alt-rock music, and magnetic fields of spritzy perfume, and undulant laughter, and all of it lifted the little seeds we were on the big transgenerational tides: a glitter of genome on the wind, a tangle of pheromones on the wind, short atoms of longing. ALBERT GOLDBARTH Poetry Daily: Today’s Poem
