My Father in the Wind

Even in the dark the wind blows. I hear it
in the high branches of the great cedar
humming its one tune. In the small room
that is mine the dust grains refuse to speak
although they know it all, for they contain
the ashes of my father, being far older
than time, and the singular pain of his father
who took his own life and left his son
no final word, only silence and an open door
through which the boy—my father—discovered
the unfamiliar humped shadow swinging
in no wind. Orphaned, the boy did not
sit down by the waters of the Dnieper to weep
as a man might do in a sacred text, he did not
curse God or howl or simply stand stunned
by the bright sun’s arrival on such a day
or even beg a neighbor to cut down
the body. He climbed a ladder, braced his legs
against the top rung, and with a rusted saw
and one hand guiding the blade,
the other pulling through the golden bands
of sisal, slowly severed whatever
connected his father’s body to its final act.

You might well ask how I know all this
since the dust that was there is silent still.
You think my father never spoke? You think
because he was tall, dark-suited, responsible,
and I was a kid he wouldn’t turn suddenly
when the traffic stalled and address me
as he might address the wind? He would be dust.
He’d learned that twenty years before on that day
in Dobrovica in autumn, the day the wind called
to him from the plane trees flanking the river
to say, “Here’s your secret!” The light attacked
through the mismatched boards of the barn roof.
Rain was on the way but that was days off.
The golden afterthoughts of hay, fodder,
and dried horse dung rose in the air to form
a message only a fatherless child could read.
Another wind blew last night, the same wind
through the same cedars that welcomed me
back from madness thirty years ago and brought
the blessing I required. The wind can do that,
it can carry all the voices of the living
and the dead, but the dust holds its knowledge.