Trees in the Wind

Outside the window, the wind gasps and wails
I look but cannot see if the trees are stirred up.

I hear the wind twist
around a corner, swerve
around the building, panting.

When it pauses, ghostly laughter and drunken voices,
drift inside, in spite of the closed window—

Then the wind is back
howling               moaning
              gasping               heaving
(I feel so                    alone
:
so small, lost,
hearing the ravenous wind
prowl the huge darkness.)

His sweeping claims chase my stillborn words
chasing his words. The conversation fugues in my mind.

Only in the twilight of retrospect do I see
the glow of ideas that really mattered to him—
the ideas I should have dealt with

(Words spoken are only leaves
      hanging from branches of emotion.
            Everything grows from the trunk
which is, character)—

Winter with a howling wind. The stripped trees
(not even snow-spotted) stand bare and proud in the cold

No matter how I stare,
I cannot see them
                                    move.

[poem by me, written around 5am]