The clouds abandoned their high
ground for a hilltop,
stooping to peer down until
their shoulders poured out.
Their thousand faces fell like
falling was freedom.
A troop of infant thunderheads
toddled from the front,
Left their lightning leaning
against the posts they deserted,
Left their license to kill
picnics and bride’s big days
In yesterday’s poorly forecasted
pants, and wore
fog-face to play hooky with our
troubled solids.
A plumage of wet tongues toured
the neighborhood angles
hoping to scour their softness
off, scrape away
their skinlessness, rub an
actual elbow, test
the limits of the privilege of
formlessness
on our abundant corners. To a
sheltered cloud
our rooftops might seem a field
of caltrops worth
stomping on, to see if their
feet can feel, if a wisp
could ever know a thorn’s love,
if the mists could learn
separation that cuts like loss, not
just drifting apart.
These empty giants have no heels
to leave undipped
in the river of invincibility, and
maybe they long to confess a
secret weakness
they’ll never have. So these
clouds have come down to squander
a strength older than
inheritance itself for
a few gropes of grass and
tailpipes and plastic flags,
they forsake the divine right of
physics that floats
their wandering lifestyle for a
chance to touch
dirt and die the death of a
dewdrop.
These clouds must despise the immunity
earned
by grandfather sky, the wisdom
of separate beds
learned by falling hard for the
first mountain he saw.
Her motherhood is a debt they
cannot forget
as easily as their shapes or
gratitude. Again
one cloud strains his head
through the pin oak,
in hopes the grasp of green
exceeds the leaves’
rules of engagement, that
they’ve grown sharp enough
to punish the wind for cutting
in, but the cloud
only feels another fearless
unclasping of hands,
another joyless reunion on another
other side.
Escape is still not enough. They needed to prove they’re not
proud, defrock the stratosphere,
bare the sky’s limits.
So this morning they blotted out
that bloodless
blue, they tossed their
first-class tickets for the jet stream,
diverted the burning baggage of
sunlight into
each other, puffed-up prisms
that they are, and spread
that wealth of white like Jack Frost
burst a vein,
blurred the sky back to the
color of canvas, and
then forgot which philosophy
they were teaching.
When the chance of rain came to
collect, they danced
like girls unable to imagine the
cost of lust,
they held bits of world just
long enough to wet them
and let them go, like boys who never
lost a toy
in an ocean or a forest, they
can’t imagine
how susceptible they are to all that
endlessness,
and then the show was over. The
clouds were driven
back to their mansions, and the
story of their morning
wasn’t even worth telling to each
other, up there.
