Wind Winter
All night, each night, the wind
as against the hull of some dropped
ship in a dried up sea
the rain seems to wish to fill.
On the window, blazing drops
looking like stars
my daughter says after quieting
from her rage over the speed
of her sister up the stairs.
Nothing can sharpen the world,
but our dullish eyes can see sky
in a window, not because night
blacked out the glass and neighbor’s
bright safety lights lit the residues
of rain, but the seeming order it made,
which isn’t organized, really;
the drops are dropping, or drying
the moment they land,
and the window has already begun
its slow droop we won’t live
long enough to see the results of.
Everything counts. The wind
smells of molding maple leaves,
seems to come from every direction at once.
Jeremy Voigt’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Post Road, Willow Springs, Fifth Wednesday Journal, BPJ, and other magazines. His chapbook, Neither Rising nor Falling, was featured on The Writer’s Almanac. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his manuscript, Estuary, has been a semi-finalist for the Dorset Prize, The Crab Orchard first book prize, and the Miller Williams prize. He lives, writes, reads, parents, runs, and lives by a large lake in western Washington.