Dave Bonta borrows the shape of a symphony to tell a story about wind, and the borrowing is more than decoration. His four tempo markings, Allegro, Andante, Adagio and Largo, run from lively to walking pace to slow to very slow, and the poem's mood slows with them. It begins in comedy and ends close to a funeral.
The Allegro is a small domestic scene. A woman on a sailboat, "secure in her windbreaker," enjoys being "buffeted so much" that her husband turns sullen. The line break does a little work of its own: the verb "points" hangs at the end of a line, and the next line swings the boat "toward shore," just as the husband swings the tiller. Here wind is pleasure, and also a contest of wills. The Andante keeps the humour but lets loss in. A poplar tree complains that the wind "took all my money / & threw it / in the gutter." Judging by the imagery, the money is the tree's fallen leaves, and the tree is left "swaying like an idiot / with my arms still up," like someone who has been robbed and hasn't yet lowered their hands. The wind is a thief, but a natural one, and the poem can still laugh at it.
The laughter stops in the Adagio. A man comes home from Afghanistan and cannot find "the mountain at first," because old Backbone Mountain has "shrunk / almost to nothing," "pinned down by 400-foot turbines / moaning through the night." The poem never explains, but the vocabulary is military. "Pinned down" is what soldiers say of men under fire, and the turbines moan like the wounded. The poem seems to suggest that the returning soldier finds a different kind of occupation at home. The stanzas shrink to single lines separated by white space, so the reader has to pause, as if the mountain were being searched for on the page.
The Largo is the longest section and the darkest. "Stiltgrass spreads like cancer between the pylons," and the simile is blunt, with no softening. The next line is stranger: "a green feathery shroud for the clumps of feathers." The repeated word makes the grass's softness grotesque, since it covers what the turbines have killed. Then come small, exact details: "beaks & talons / blue as old ice," and the "delicate finger bones of forest bats / stripped of the brown parchment / on which they flew." A bat's wing really is a hand with elongated fingers, so the image is anatomically accurate. "Parchment" also hints at writing, and at once the poem produces a line of writing: "What profit hath he / that hath labored for the wind?" The old-fashioned phrasing echoes Ecclesiastes, the Biblical book about the futility of human toil. Set among the carcasses, the question becomes an uncomfortable audit of whether this labour is worth its cost.
The last line is the poem's sharpest: "& overhead the bone-white blades scything the air." A scythe is the reaper's tool, and "bone-white" ties the blades to the skeletons below, so the machine turns into a harvester of death. Notice, too, that after the second movement the wind itself nearly vanishes as an actor. The title's double meaning, wind as natural force and power as harnessed energy, shifts to a darker sense of power, the kind that takes while someone else pays.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and the ampersands and almost total lack of punctuation give it a plain, spoken feel. Its music comes from sound. The soft, spreading sibilance of "Stiltgrass spreads," the long vowel of "moaning," and the hiss of "scything" all carry the wind into the language.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to shout. It never says that wind turbines are good or bad. It lets a joke, a complaint, a homecoming and a heap of bones accumulate until the reader has to decide what the evidence adds up to. For students, it shows how structure can carry argument, and how a poem can question a comfortable assumption, here that clean energy costs nothing, through images instead of statistics.