One seldom sees a breeze,

But I came about as close as one can come  

Sure, one can detect the force and direction of the wind

By its effects on things in its path ‑‑

Witness a tornado's funnel,

A hurricane's fury;

Leaves rustling in trees

Or scuttling along the ground,

Clouds scudding across the sky,

Even snow wraiths snaking and writhing down a plowed road ‑‑

I'm talking about a much subtler matter,

Where something only as material as

An image striking one's eye

Is pushed around by the wind,

The wind thus betraying its presence and movements

Like some careless adversary  

I was sitting in my car

In the parking lot at work,

Reading during lunch‑hour

As is my wont each day  

I looked up for a moment ‑‑

In a thin horizontal zone

Just above the front of my car's hood

The air was dancing in ripples of heat

Rising from my sun‑warmed, dark blue car  

As I studied this sight I saw that

Even slightly moving my viewpoint vertically

Caused the effect to disappear  

It was only through the unlikely alignment in my line of sight

Of the thin layer of heated air above the hood

And the sunlit metallic grille

Of the car parked head‑on to mine

That the ordinarily transparent swirl of air currents

Became visible,

Even if only indirectly by its effect

On the swimming image reaching my eyes like a mirage  

That remarkable, garbled, marbled image of the grille

Streamed turbulently sideways,

Stopping, starting back the opposite way,

Stopping again and reversing itself again,

Internal eddies whirling within the image,

Building and breaking with each sweep

Like a family of fractal waves

Carried along within the larger motion  

For a short while

A window on the wind

Had opened just a crack