"Stressful and Exhausting": Missouri's First Poet Laureate Reflects on His Tenure

PHOTOGRAPHING THE WIND

All photographs are accurate.
None of them is truth.
-- Richard Avedon

This is a wholly comfortable wind,
tailored and too expensive for the end
of a ragged century. Sitting on the porch,
it has us believing again. I breathe
this wind that isn't in a hurry,
isn't pushing through the crowd
of oaks to see what has fallen, isn't
banging unlatched screen doors to get in,
isn't rattling loose panes awake,
isn't scooping up newspapers and forcing
their headlines against fences; it's already
too late. We drink coffee, balance
cups on the wooden railing and forget.

The bird in the photograph has already
abandoned the air and stands
on barren ground, a lord with wings
folded, statuesque, a feathered black
granite that has dropped from an African
sky. Though the bird looms large
and too alert, it's in the background,
and on this all too clear and sunny day
we know the bird can't be blamed.
this is simply what it knows best.
though it may have arrived a little
early, it is certain in its waiting.

The naked child, has drawn her kneeds up
to her chest, her forehead pressed against
years of parched ground, her forearms
stretched forward and away from either side
of her thinning body, her back to the steadfast bird,
guardian of this warring, drought-stricken plain.

This is when we want to believe in a wind
such as this one crossing the porch,
that refuses to carry a cry or spread
the scent of finality, and instead braids
strands of warmth through the cool
of evening, between the spaces of outspread
fingers, our hands failed kites,
our lives falling through this luxurious air.

Walter Bargen's new book, "Days Like This Are Necessary," was released a few weeks ago. He will be doing a workshop at The Big Read on Saturday, Oct. 10. For more info, click here. The 61-year-old has lived in Ashland, Missouri for four decades. He is a senior coordinator at Mizzou's Assessment Resource Center.