Wind Chime

John Pass
From: Stumbling In The Bloom (Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books, 2005)

       Let the wind speak
                                               that is paradise.          Ezra Pound

Come sway in its ear-level lilt and lapses, fond instrument
day-long of come what may. It lolls, an insatiate

tongue for the random, whim's trinket, net
of the invisible, middle-sister to leaf

and sail, shimmering
suspension in silver wire, knotted

to waft and to the copper lizard, to the warm belly
of sleep, to the cusp and tasty metallic slither

of consciousness. Here
in the slip-stream off
a five tone scale, in

infinite range of interval, swinging from sunny
jingle to anguished cacophony, shimmies all the jazz

and dirge of weather — limitless possibility, excruciating
limitation. Here is the puffed world expansive

as the air come sidling, glancing
home to itself at a porch corner

thinly, briefly, just under the eaves. It might be
our biggest brain tinkling, immersed

in a further exquisite brilliance, that ultimately appropriate distance:
background. Lead, accompaniment! Lest we blunder

against you forever ducking inside for the phone... Let's slip/
slide sun-stunned and song-prone astray

into bodiless voice.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6 | Poem 7 | Poem 8 | Poem 9

John Pass' works copyright © to the author.