BIG SISTER WIND

Man oh man,

only 10AM
and I can tell you already,

gonna be one o’ them days

when the temperature’s climbin’ steady

and the air is a thick and heavy sludge.

One o’ them days
when the neighbor’s always-yappin’ mutts

lay neutralized and sprawled about and all the birds

refuse to budge,

when the sun and the ground
aspire to conspire

to boil us down and sweat us out

into the churning, bubbling

atmospheric soup above.

But Big Sister Wind

with her gears and cranks
and her cast-iron tanks

and her pneumatic, automatic,
operatic bellow-fulls

of cool basso-profundo

aint never
gonna let it go that way

(well,
not today,
anyway).

-Jason Ryberg, 2003