To Cleave
This morning a sheer, immaculate sky
was bisected horizon to horizon
by interlacing white and blue threads of a cloud formation,
delicate, curling filaments, intricate weavings
that bound east to west. And held their breath.
I stood at my back door, thinking feather, then quill.
I tried to find some image to hold the loveliness in my mind
and noticed, in this search for words, a clunk of loss.
I looked for thickness, a spine in the feather,
a sharpness of the quill that I could name as nib.
It was sort of a game, but to win was to miss.
As if I’d been shown a poem in unfamiliar, lyrical script
whose mystery might have dusted my skin, my lips, like pollen drift,
and invited some tongue of wordlessness to rise, to sip.
But quick, with a neat sticky label, I’d grabbed. To own.
To keep. A sort of self-caging. Offered a sky alive with
the possible wild, the infinite strange, I’d looked for a nib,
found only an ink-flick of grief.
A crick in my neck. Obtuseness sour in my gut.
I breathed in, breathed out.
When I looked up, the cloud had loosened,
tendrils unlooping, its coherence becoming unnameable open,
unnameable new.
And this. A cloud poem shifting, finding something less certain.
About stillness at my back door? Smallness? Perhaps about staying.