W*nd
When I arrived
I didn’t know
the word
for what I was.
I kept arriving.
Butting my head
against the shore.
A head with no word.
And one day
I heard. And it heard
that what I was
was wind. The one
w*nd, I was
the rumour of my own being.
A groundless rumour
in residence.
*
Sure I said. Sure.
Though I wasn’t
and have never
been. Shore I said.
Repeating their word
for where I had brought
them. But no shore
was ever a harbour
for me. Never home
entirely. Where are
all four directions
home? Or when?
Sure. I said sure.
Repeating their word
for this coastal state
where I’m never entirely.
*
W, w, w …
Between the wires
weather from elsewhere
becomes ours.
Another aloneness
checks in with us, checks us
where stops meet starts.
Entering like my old stutter.
Perhaps the beginning
was the ultimate abbreviation
or silver cord. Aeolus,
a god with all
vowels but one,
knotted the winds in an ox skin.
All the swirling directions a word
could go, but home. West, west.
*
Wis, wis. In the beginning
w, w, w … It’s the was
not the Word I stutter at, before I
arrive, in w and s
at the aleph, or alif
that blows me into being.
To the in of the in. The black
of the star, reversed to when all that
was began, before solar w*nd,
intergalactic w*nd,
a first breath from beyond
my bond, my vowel.
A wavering oneness
or wand. One’s shyest
earliest wound
unwound.
About this poem
This poem was written as part of ‘The Blue Crevasse’ project, which marks the centenary of W.S. Graham in 2018. The image of a blue crevasse famously appears in W.S. Graham’s poem ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’, and the author’s estate welcomed the idea of creating a similar metaphorical space where admirers of the poet might, in a sense, be lowered for a month’s solitary ‘residency’.