Moulin a Vent

Source: National Gallery of Art

Unpublished.  The Rembrandt used to hang in the National Gallery, and started out one poem that turned into this one. The bone flute is real; you can hear it here. What else. Breath, in Hebrew "ruach," in Chinese "qi" in Greek "pneuma" is synonymous with wind, spirit and life; "Prophesy to the wind" is one possible translation of Ezekiel 37:9, from which comes "dem bones."

Moulin a Vent

Even if I had will enough to turn
the vane without fail raises
my face always into the wind.

Where else would I look but
into an unseen valley,
into a breeze imagined by inkbrush

imagined in soot & from air unmoving?
Breath, come to me, come to
the wing bone of the red-crowned crane;

prophesy to the winds, breath, come
to the dry bones –  & they stamped their feet
& danced with the whistling crane.

Breath spoke upon the ruined walls
where millstones gather in hobbled pilgrimage
to cracked corn & a more cracked song;

came into a child stepping carefully on each –
ask her what she sings & she will look up
in surprise as though she never were.

There once was a miller, I say,
who had three sons & a cat
but they never tell you why you should listen –

she has run away, does not yet feel her bones
pulling her downward, does not ask
the treasure of another’s wing; she knows

the wind is not what it seems: it lifts ink
off the page & with the bone flute’s air
will raise the dead crane back into the sky.