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When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voice, Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to the dead. Two: A man is four winds and three fires. And the four winds are his father’s voice, his mother’s voice . . . Or maybe he’s seven winds and ten fires. And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching, dreaming, thinking . . . Or is he the breath of God? When the wind turns traveler and asks, in my father’s voice,Have you prayed? I remember three things. One: A father’s love is milk and sugar, two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and what’s left over is trimmed and leavened to make the bread the dead and the living share. And patience? That’s to endure the terrible leavening and kneading. And wisdom? That’s my father’s face in sleep. When the wind asks,Have you prayed? I know it’s only me reminding myself a flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture, and blood was fire, salt, and breath long before it quickened any wand or branch, any limb that woke speaking. It’s just me in the gowns of the wind, or my father through me, asking, Have you found your refuge yet? asking,Are you happy? Strange. A troubled father. A happy son. The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one.

Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above the dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown Connecticut Valley. Far beneath, chickens daintily pause and move unseen in the yard of the tumbledown farmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath. Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone, all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged ridges, the silver stream that threads quivering like a living bone of steel, badly notched with rapids, the townships like strings of beads strewn across New England. Having slid down to nil thermometers—those household gods in niches— freeze, inhibiting thus the fire of leaves and churches’ spires. Still, no churches for him. In the windy reaches, undreamt of by the most righteous choir, he soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut, his talons clutched tight into his belly —claws balled up like a sunken fist— sensing in each wisp of down the thrust from below, glinting back the berry of his eyeball, heading south-southeast to the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still: to a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell of grass whose edges no fingers trust, sunk amid forest’s odors, filled with splinters of red-speckled eggshell, with a brother or a sister’s ghost. The heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing, pulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping, propelled by internal heat and sense, the bird goes slashing and scissoring the autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token, enlarging it at the expense of its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye, a dot, sliding far above the lofty pine tree; at the expense of the empty look of that child, arching up at the sky, that couple that left the car and lifted their heads, that woman on the stoop. But the uprush of air is still lifting him higher and higher. His belly feathers feel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze, he sees the horizon growing dim, he sees, as it were, the features of the first thirteen colonies whose chimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight that tells the bird of his elevation, of what altitude he’s reached this trip. What am I doing at such a height? He senses a mixture of trepidation and pride. Heeling over a tip of wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air bounces him back, winging up to glory, to the colorless icy plane. His yellow pupil darts a sudden glare of rage, that is, a mix of fury and terror. So once again he turns and plunges down. But as walls return rubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near, he’s driven upward this time as well! He! whose innards are still so warm! Still higher! Into some blasted ionosphere! That astronomically objective hell of birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars play millet served from a plate or a crescent. What, for the bipeds, has always meant height, for the feathered is the reverse. Not with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs he guesses the truth of it: it’s the end. And at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak there tears free of him and flies ad luminem the sound Erinyes make to rend souls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek, the shriek of steel that devours aluminum; “mechanical,” for it’s meant for nobody, for no living ears: not man’s, not yelping foxes’, not squirrels’ hurrying to the ground from branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears can’t be avenged this way, which forces them into their burrows. And only hounds lift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal, more nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding of the diamond cutting glass, slashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel for an instant, shuddering from this rending. For the warmth burns space in the highest as badly as some iron fence down here brands incautious gloveless fingers. We, standing where we are, exclaim “There!” and see far above the tear that is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers in wavelets, a spider skein swelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space whose lack of echo spells, especially in October, an apotheosis of pure sound. And caught in this heavenly patterned lace, starlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder, silver-clad, crystal-bound, the bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high of azure. Through binoculars we foretoken him, a glittering dot, a pearl. We hear something ring out in the sky, like some family crockery being broken, slowly falling aswirl, yet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt but melt when handled. And in a twinkling once more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings, rainbowlike, multicolored, blurred commas, ellipses, spirals, linking heads of barley, concentric rings— the bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed, a map, now a mere heap of flying pale flakes that make a green slope appear white. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed, swarm out of doors to catch them, crying with a loud shout in English, “Winter's here!”

He can’t stop putting the dead flowers, the deadhead nails, the deadweight sacks of flour in his mouth. He can’t stop writing about the mouth. The way he woke up to his mouth full of bees, their dead crunch still stinging his gums. He writes:There’s something beautiful in the way a mouth can be broken by saliva and cold air

He laughed with a laugh that he wished was his laugh, but everyone knew it wasn’t. When he laughed he would ask, "Does that sound like my laugh?" and everyone said, "It doesn’t." The laugh that he laughed that wasn’t his laugh went "Hardy har har, guffaw!" The laugh that he laughed that he wished wasn’t his went, "Hruck, sniffle-hick, hee-haw!"

He that doth wend her, Let him lend her.

Every sand rushes the beaches are first people’s museum ample by laughter original (overseers) things must change where names are forgiven ports shores bays renamed won’t hurt the truth for children histories futures. The mouth who named mountains for brainwave oversea shook weekage house living, stay by a dead cold rotten lie. Whitefellas must derigetter their conzinerices atturies. Beach have turn not by your Scotland bream them down under sir Scot cos you’ve stole Blackfellas alots. Homestead will fall again for huppy Yumbas, gaining restored trust to not live in past. Telegraphic Aborigines were always in first port worlds. Aquarium birds mammals sing now, tell us substantial ramps up on the banks that flanked the dreamers times occupants. Nature rates over new buildings. New names for the city towns not virgin bush inkeep as the real keeper are watching every development. Renames IDs of all needs domain pleasant rebirth to grow majority. First houses were here by natives nice and right to season changing by dreaming winds rain hot people’s names ... Dromana man reclaim names first foremost.

Where I lived once, a roller coaster's range of timber hills peaked just by our backyard cliff and cats undulated scream-driven round its seismograph— and climbed up to us with an indrawn gasp of girls. Smiles and yelling could be exchanged as they crested then they'd pitch over, straining back in a shriek that volleyed as the cars were snatched from sight in the abyss, and were soon back. Weekdays they rested, and I rested all days. There was a spider in my head I'd long stay unaware of. If you're raped you mostly know but I'd been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it. Aloof in a Push squat, I thought I was moral, or dead. Misrule was strict there, and the Pill of the day only ever went into one mouth, not mine, and foamed a Santa-beard. I was resented for chastity, and slept on an overcoat. Once Carol from upstairs came to me in bra and kindness and the spider secreted by girls' derision-rites to spare women from me had to numb me to a crazed politeness. Squeals rode the edge of the thrill building. Cartoonist Mercier drew springs under Sydney. Push lovers were untrue on principle. It's all architecture over there now. A new roller coaster flies its ups and downs in wealth's face like an affront. I've written a new body that only needs a reader's touch. If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don't.

My mother–half-deaf, a small metal box pinned to her blouse, and beneath the gray locks the hidden earphone, the wire running across her heart to its home in her ear–can barely hear me anymore. I’m just someone’s voice lost years ago, trying now to make myself clear, deliberately now, so she will see how hard the words come. Bent to her breast, I speak to the heart, almost hopeless, where hardly anyone is ever heard.

The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now, leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous, jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements, caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances, like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back. But I could not move. And then the music was gone. All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down, their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt, gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise, an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.

made it to Florida and then I went for a walk. The frog pond is half-iced over. I chucked a stick at it— still thin. On the white side, the wind twirled a leaf around like a prepubescent figure skater who’s given up her childhood to get here. Of course, the leaf was wearing its practice costume of browns, the whole world offed of spangles as I am offed of you. Why mail snow? Just to show I could keep it cold in so much heat.