Daytime Moon

by Leonard Orr

From the book:

WIND FARMS

Let us run off faraway, to the west, to one of those
dry unloved ridges, beyond the army training area,
beyond the Indian reservation with its casinos, land
scorched or sagebrushed, where the winds tickle
the fat rocky toes of the foothills of the Cascades.
No one will look for us there; we can be wind farmers.

It will take hard work with such unpromising soil
but in a few years think of the pleasures of our land.
There will be the acres of chinooks and harmattans
blowing off hats, rocking trailers passing on the interstates.
Zephyrs and mistrals will hang like pupae from the mulberries,
when ripe cracking open to blow hotly at harvest time.

Our handcrafted simooms will snap across the tables
at the farmer's markets, trade winds we use for swapping
(we'll take boxes of Santa Anas and frilly fresh Föhn
for steamy sirocco or refreshing sea-breezes, tailwinds,
baby cyclones, though we refuse to take the doldrums).
At the county fair we judge kids' squalls and eat soufflés.

Boundary layer winds will ruffle your silky hair, while
my wind farmer's nose will sense shifts in the coriolis force.
My hands feel your pressure gradient from high to low,
our skin responds to the sun's supersonic winds. We'll toss off
pants and windsocks with the gusts and gales, each breeze.
Aeolian harps hum, while winded we breathe and sigh.

40 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Leonard Orr, Professor of English, Washington State University Vancouver. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University. He has been with Washington State University since 1991. He has taught about eighty different courses in criticism, comparative and world literatures, and British and American literature, especially Twentieth-Century. In recent years, he has developed work in the areas of Holocaust representation and literature of exile (he has received research fellowships from the Holocaust Education Foundation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem). He is the author or editor of thirteen books of literary criticism or critical theory. His most recent books are Joyce, Imperialism, and Postcolonialism (Syracuse University Press, 2008), and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (Continuum, 2009) and two collections of poetry, Why We Have Evening (Cherry Grove, 2010) and Timing Is Everything (Cherry Grove, 2012). He was named the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professor of English (2005-08).

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Leonard^^Orr