Wind From South

It was just a clip, maybe thirty seconds.

On a small screen, in a rented room.

But the wind, I swear, I felt it here,

rattling the blinds, pulling at the gloom.

Patagonia. A word I taste, like salt

or dust. Tall grasses, bent almost flat,

brushing against something unseen.

The sky, a blue that hurts the eyes, that.

And a mountain, jagged, far, so far

my life would need to unspool, then start again

to find it. To stand where that wind blows

through everything, a cold, clean pain.

And here, the heater kicks on, a familiar sound.

Dust motes swim in the lamp's pale reach.

The wind outside is just the city's drone.

I try to hold the picture, the rough speech

of that foreign, blowing land.

But it shrinks, already, back to sand.