Anastasios Mihalopoulos

Thoughts on the Invention of the Alphabet from a Cottage in Prince Edward Island

The wind wants what it wants
which was never to be written down.

Somewhere a loon opens its throat
to this old elemental thing and it understands

what we underestimate the physics of.
Of cramming this entity into a vowel

as if a shape, drawn to the page
with a human hand, could ever shake

the trees outside the window,
the way the gales are doing right now.

I step outside to watch or to listen.
My senses are blurred in this way

as I see the wind moving the trees
into a shuffling alphabet of hums and hisses

and I grieve that I have but one clumsy tongue
to translate this. I think of the other stirrings in the field

the tiniest thump of a fox’s paw as it leaps
back into the earth. The grasses that rustle as it does so 

how these sounds blend with the wind
controlling the timbre of my thoughts. 

Now, I think of the loggers, of the noise,
of the clear cuts taking wind’s instruments
to make our instruments, and us, making sounds, 

clumsy sounds, with those instruments,
then writing them down—calling the long elegant yawn 

of a string vibrating in the body of a hundred-year-old tree
that ricochets through the atoms of the air into our ear

something so simple as the note, A.

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Anastasios Mihalopoulos is a Greek/Italian-American from Boardman, Ohio. He received his MFA in poetry from the Northeast Ohio MFA program and his BS in both Chemistry and English from Allegheny College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Driftwood Press, Fairy Tale Review, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Brunswick.