WIND SINGING

The wind we're experiencing nowadays is part of that big change that happens early each year when the Sun on its daily path across the sky starts rising high enough to banish the North's winter, and to set the stage for our rainy season. These winds, then, aren't local or even regional, but rather the work of a majestic planetary adjustment. Maybe that's why this wind, of all winds, to me is transcendent, the wind most likely to set me to watching it, thinking about it, and feeling it.

How delicious to lie inside the mosquito net in the hut, deep in the night or maybe during a sweaty mid-day siesta, when suddenly an unusually assertive, vagrant breeze rustles the roof's thatched fringe all around, causes the mosquito net's walls to billow or lean against my side, and cool air to ripple across my body.

Sometimes the billowing netting reminds me of the kites kids fly in every village during these windy days , homemade kites not bearing gaudy pictures of rockets or spiky stars on them, but maybe the kid's own drawings, and maybe with cut-paper fringes that flutter in the wind, and maybe the kite has a knotty cloth tail that circles when the kite loops. Some people are like kites, I think, when I think about kites, in that they're always resisting life's wind and in doing so are thus destined to endless gyrations, soaring and diving and, inevitably, the come-downs, or crashes. Better to be the wind itself, I think, when I think about kites.

The other day for a few seconds a breeze rustled the thatch, blew the netting to one side and even stirred dust from my dirt floor. The commotion roused me from an early afternoon siesta. Rising onto my elbows, through spaces between the hut's wall-polls I saw the little birdbath beneath the Tree Cotton outside my door. A Melodious Blackbird perched on a rock in the water, his feathers ruffled and wet after bathing, and he was looking around at the wind. Looking at the wind, feeling it on his wet skin beneath sodden feathers, on his moist eyes, seeing the Tree Cotton's leaves shake, the pink Cosmoses beside him heave, and I thought how beautiful it must be being a blackbird in the wind.

The Clay-colored Robins were singing then, too, their chiming, echoic, monotonously repetitive phrases some kind of sweet, hypnotic lullaby, their singing mingled with the rustling wind, and I thought about the robins silhouetted deep in shadows among leaves alive with the wind, the robins singing into the wind.

I would like to sing into the wind, but I haven't the voice for it. I try to do it metaphorically, I guess. In fact, I like to think that these words issued into cyberspace are my windsong. The thoughts formless, like the wind, not rooting anyplace, mental images swirling around insinuating themselves into random reality-crevices, not really having any meaning at all, just being, just flowing, finally calming down to nothingness.