Keith Polette

Window Fan

Passing the wind farm on the edge of the city, I notice its field of hard crops, neat rows of turbines, those tall white stems, leafless, topped with a three-bladed flower that is brought to bloom by the breath of Zephyrus. And I recall my childhood home, too poor for air conditioning, with its single window fan, large as the propeller of a fighter plane, inside a heavy metal cage with bars so strong that they could have held a panther. When turned on high, the fan roared to life and sucked the hot air out of the house and blew it into the blazing day, while the walls shuddered with the shock that they might be ripped from their foundation and propelled into the flight. At night, the fan turned slowly like the screw of a ship taking the house into a sea of deep darkness. With each of us below deck, drifting in our own secret dreams, the house grew quiet in its long voyage through summer, the only sound the sporadic creaking of the floorboards, like someone walking the deck, causing me to wonder who was at the helm and at what distant port would I disembark.

a child's pinwheel. . .
so many thoughts spinning
in the wind 

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About the Author

Keith Polette lives in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of a book of haiku, The New World, and a book of haibun, Pilgrimage, both published by Red Moon Press.