33. Wind Song

LONG ago I learned how to sleep,

In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,

In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,

In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”

I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.

There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.

Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,

Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:

Who, who are you?

Who can ever forget

listening to the wind go by

counting its money

and throwing it away?