Prairie Wind

Life out on the plains is defined by its most abundant resource. With hills only gently rolling and trees solitary and scarce, the wind is always moving around and embracing us prairie people, or knocking us down. For poets the wind is an archetype of the transient and ephemeral. They use it to allude to that which can never be captured or tamed; to that which we know is there, yet is beyond our vision and grasp. For us, its as solid as the dirt it kicks up and carries along.
Wind is created by polarity. It is the difference in pressure from one region to the next that causes air to rush about in a vain attempt to achieve equilibrium. The pursue is vain because the pressures themselves change as the sun heats one place and is blocked by clouds in another; day turns to night; and water rises through the air and falls back down again.
We hear our friend speak in howls and roars, and whisper in rustling grasses. We have asked him to help with our labors, lifting water from deep within the earth as he tightly grabs
and turns the windmill. He lifts our spirits too as we send a kite up to meet and greet him.
For recreation, he drives me across the lake, and I cheat him by tacking back against his
push.
We feel his hand on our backs as we walk
northward in the summer; and that same hand
slapping our faces along the trail when the seasons have changed.
Wind tastes like soil. It smells like cattle
manure, or fresh-cut hay. It looks like a cloud
of dust or horizontal rain flying by the west window and slamming violently into the north one.
In his absence is calm. But without wind, the plains are not the world we know. When
the universe is in perfect equilibrium, we are off
balance.