Light Wind

The wind is light and smells of summer rain.
He lies beneath his years, adrift in light,
cooled by wind. The morphine taken for pain
has left him in a pillowed daze. Where night

is caught by day, where light and shadow catch
as wind ruffles cedar and sugar pine,
he thinks he hears rain. In a tear-drop patch
of light across his chest he can count nine

faces he remembers. Then it turns dark
and the faces catch like tufts of cotton
on the ragged fence of his toes. They mark
his body's end. Now he has forgotten

everything but the smell of summer rain
mingled with cedar and sugar pine. Light
it seems can be borne on wind the way pain
can be borne on breath, or a trace of night

on noon's brilliant shimmer. The wind is light.
The wind is summer rain, the breath of years,
a face transformed to memory. The night
has come at last to wash away his tears.

Gone now, leaving only light. Gone, as pain
is gone, and time, and then the sound of rain.

-- Floyd Skloot, from The End of Dreams

Floyd Skloot website