“…global wind speeds have decreased by some 5 to 15 percent
	over the last three decades, and are expected to decrease another
	15 percent in the coming century.”
	 – from “The Forgotten Part of Climate: Slower Winds,”
	   Conservation Magazine
 
I loved an island so windy the butterflies evolved away their wings
so as not to be blown out to sea—there is such a place.
 
The wind, bulk movement of air, left windthrow
(uprooted trees) or windsnap (broken boles),
flinging leaves across the street like swift lemmings,
squalling them in a dawdle of hopping toads.
 
Ellensburg wind could blow ticks off a tomcat.
Sequoias survived gusts by interlocking shallow roots.
 
Adosculation is wind-pollination—sex without contact,
the embrace of a stiff breeze at the beach, refreshing—
whereby randy mares “conceive of the wind, like hens”
who lay “wind eggs,” addled, without shells, said scientists in AD 70.
 
Windmills became sacraments: “electricity, they say,
is a disembodied idea, like faith, that exists only by its expression.”
 
Before the birth of wind, Eurynome rose up from chaos,
divided water from sky, leaving skirls and gusts.
Wind, growing from pirouettes, now somehow dying.
 
Even wind at a mile an hour, a quarter of my speed:
better than the emptiness of the sax never played,
the wingless butterfly, walking, with nothing to do.