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.