Luke Whitington: ‘Wind with a different destination’ and ‘Lover of views’

Wind with a different destination

Young once you trusted
In a secret destiny
But there was none to come
You were crashing through
The boundaries of chance.

Blissfully unaware, untouched
Chance was your sole destiny
And everything else a happy accident—
Other feet and minds of thoughts
Now walk those paths

Who have no memory
Of the moon, the light, the dark
You saw, they sort through
Different shades and names
With different faces

Shadows once tethered have shifted
They wait for the sway of different
Pendulums, today on the last hill
With the dusty whine of a dry carafe
The last, good red half-of-a-glass, left

You watch the wind whip
The sheets on the clothesline
Likewise the clouds, like sails
Tugged and torn across the ocean’s horizon
Like destiny, like chance
Tossed in the dancing sibilance of surf and foam.

Luke Whitington

Lover of views
In memory of W.H. Auden

The heart has eaten
Into the face
Its furies’ shadows
Formed into creases—
Who am I?
I sit in a chair
Possibly an outcast—
If nothing, I have become a lover
Even a prisoner of views.

I wear sometimes
Masks of poetry
The “I” of “I” hides
There, behind, eyes widened—
Like today when the view is veering
Following climbing lines of planted vines
Yesterday the cypresses

Coupled in ascent
Were faithful always to the end.
Loyal to those who have since forgotten
I chose a road alone
And to myself or poems
I talked, no one told me
How to follow the path

That leads me here, again, to find tomorrow.
The lines of verse have mostly flowed;
Some were conversations with others
Some were answers to questions
Never asked, some were a life’s walkabout
Wandering eastward across the pages
Words finding step or fitting into places

Some to invent, some to make real
Some phrases made to live the unlived
Some made to unlive the pain
Real or invented—but lived all the same.

The heart has eaten into the face
Its furies’ shadows fallen into creases—
Who am I?
I sit in a chair, an outcast
A lover of views;
Views I recast to remake my face.

Luke Whitington