Lisa Olstein

If the Wind Shifts

 

Just give me a minute here

among the radishes and asparagus,

the dogs barking from two boundary lines away.

I’m waiting for the cows to rise up

on their swollen knees and speak across time

with the shapes of their bodies.

If the wind shifts, if the men who feed them

will leave the tools they’ve been tending

and just hold still a minute,

if the woman in the yard will forget

the stalls of painted turtles and canaries

in the alleyway where she stood

when the bomb went off, if everything

could just for one second please hold still,

we’ll see if tonight they’ll rise into the statues

they make when there is no moon,

white beacons in a black galaxy settling.

 

 

From Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

 Copper Canyon Press, 2006