YVETTE LECLAIR

Within the Whirl
	    
                            The doors 
     keep rattling—I’m
     shivering, desperate for a poem
     to stuff into their maws …
            ~Denise Levertov, 'The Whirlwind'

I’m desperate for a poem about
neither myself nor desperation.
Will you write it for me? Let go 
the wind's single-mindedness. Give 
me crunch of jicama, plums 
fried with spring onions, 
farm-fresh pastoral. Let words 
not rap like heavy oaken doors, 
but sway like young bamboo.
If rattle they must, don’t speak of noise
but of trees that make the wood, 
in rhyming couplet, iambic pentameter.
Perhaps a sonnet. 

I cried today because I was pushed 
at the market and the new high, 
highrises on Bloor are ugly. I can’t 
right now with rigid facades. I am 
desperate, you see, for a nice little poem 
of the natural world - flowers and such.
Send it, my love. For though not prone
to flightiness, I fear being blown
away by a whirling
anthropomorphized wind.