Sancho Panza
“When you sneeze, that means your lover’s thinking of you.”
You, swept up. The song of the breeze playing
in your hair. You, beneath the wind turbine and turn
of rotor blades. When you sneeze, my father said,
that means your lover who is not your wife
is thinking of you. Rotor blades. Hair swept up
in that power. Beneath the power of a wind turbine,
in the hinterlands of northern Indiana, you,
me taking a photo. The car cooling off in the drift
of wheat where we do not belong. Delusional,
I raise and peek through the viewfinder to capture
you beneath a turbine beside the highway
in the hinterlands of Indiana. On a quest so common
there is no mistaking us for anyone other than who
we are, lovers, unfazed by delusions, swept beneath
the power of a turbine much taller than my father,
a man for whom every journey pales to the one
he took at fifteen, alone, walking,
swimming, shivering, to Arkansas
where he expects me to still be. The wheat
and the wind winding through it like speech, like
my father’s voice, calling to ask how can I live
the way I have chosen to which is, remember,
in no way remarkable, unlike the originality
a sneeze summons, your face made new, your face
for a moment taken from you. On our way. Me, watching
the wind get translated into energy for farms
I don’t want to see. I want to see you and me, journeying.
In the photo, you’re sneezing, chronically, the wheat,
the wind, the sun, the drive, teasing out your sinal
storm and rapture. My delusions? That I’ve got time
to admire your hair in the same wind generating power,
to take a photo, to ignore my filial obligations, to repeat
my silences, to extend seriousness to the wind, the wheat,
the blades slowly turning like the hands of the watch
ticking on my wrist. Because I am not who is on my side.
I am who I need to convince. I was born with doubts in me.