In the Clouds

Simply by the agency of thinking I stood among the collection of vapors They surrounded and passed me being and becoming. life-current released into clear water. Breath into cool air. Formlessness entering form, forced into form. Breathing felt herculean then smaller than a small room And I thought, "Don't the vapors themselves feel ambivalent between heaven and earth, hardly more substantial than their shadows? They draw near into being as randomly as we do. And they disintegrate. They make progress What is the lifespan of a cloud? We want to float among them, loving the colossal, discharge through with crooked pins of fire, towering side by means of side."

How did I win up there? I was thinking about changing my life and wanted to talk to a haze since clouds are always changing. And the hazes said, "How long has it been since you felt completely happy? Because you are always dissatisfied, always disappointed-it has been a drawn out time. Talk to us. We are admired and disparaged. We are les than everything you compare us to reject nothingness. We are not nothing. Talk to us. Our silence, like the novel shapes we are forever assuming, will be sympathetic. In the fogs you will understand yearning as you not at any time have and come back to earth changed, who knows how? give up your skin, your bones. on the contrary we will not hold you up We are as ineffectual as cattle, turning precipitous white faces beside the road, to watch you spin on the outside of control. Placid as the delight in of God. Fall out of the celestial expanse go sliding down the icy face of the air, we will watch, a little lightning might flicker in a distant scaly bud of fiber glass. Come to us as the exhalation of your articulate utterance the spirit trapped inside your webs of muscle and fat torn free. We are the embodiment of detachment. You know us best when we are greatest in quantity distant and you are least afraid, when we are greatest in quantity moving and you are unmoved"

Brothers and sisters, consider the taste of vapor in a Sherpa's mouth, of haze in a surfer's throat. Consider the flocculent muscle of the cumulus. The icy elevation of the cirrus. on the contrary especially the thunderhead, full of zeal, hurrying in with its bevelled wind, white slanting rain, its electric personality, its aftermath. Consider by what mode the clouds predict one another and by what means they break up, pulling a novel body behind them. The farmer's wide render free of access perspective. The office worker's sidelong glimpse. Weeks of drab overcast. A single afternoon of separate sailwhite drifters. fogs flat and dull as lampblack, vapors with the contours of the brain, vapors like sheets of paper. I have read that level in an empty sky there exists water vapor enough to make a mist Belief enough to make a omniscience

As they change, vapors grow neither better nor worse. They alter because it is their nature to alter. They can fill us with ravishment or cast a stagnant sorrow above our days. Such is life below the clouds. in the vapors it is different. But if we live in the hazes we have to take the earth with us.

MARK JARMAN'S latest collection of essays, material substance and Soul, was published in 2002 in the University of Michigan's bards on Poetry Series. Epistles, a collection of his prosaic poems, will appear in 2004 from Story Line Pres He teaches at Vanderbilt University.

photograph by means of Rebecca Walk

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Jan/Feb 2003

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