Things to Say to the Clouds Are you listening, my neighbor kingdom? You alps of air at the end of the street, my Norway spring, you are my seeing center. I am lost in the map’s lace, I will carom wherever you point to. We have many things to discuss. Today you mum an ear. You want details, so I pick up a sycamore leaf from the sidewalk. It cups yesterday’s rain – because of you I'm mad enough to drink the leaf-drop and catch from its tip your blown kiss.
2. Like so many footnotes, the Milky Way’s grand ideas are hard to read. In the chill of space, a quiver of distance. Stars like dust clouds smother us with far. You are a whirling language of light, each word small as a cell’s shush calling to its neighbor on a sub-audible frequency in cell-communion: Is that you? And the reply: Three bells, all is well. 3. But are we well? Listening in your neighborhood, I see in the horizon’s pond-blue and your stream of silence why the babbling wisteria hugs a stone façade. I climb my uncertainty like Jack’s beanstalk. Some afternoons I want little: to look at these portraits and feel you paint yourself on me.
4. Some mornings I can’t name you except in new collisions: birdwater, pearbloom. A nuthatch hides among new plum leaf bunches, his green launch marked by petal scatter. A jay’s screed claws the air. After a night of tossing my heart in a broken pillow, of praying complaints, dawn pastels my dissatisfaction, a crazed Monet with a loaded brush. A bell-shaped cloud rings open. I name it gratitude.
Rachel Dacus’ poetry books are Another Circle of Delight, Femme au chapeau and Earth Lessons. Her work appears in the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English,Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po LISTSERV, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as in numerous print and online magazines. Read more at www.dacushome.com. She serves as a contributing editor at Umbrella magazine and blogs at http://dacusrocket.blogspot.com.
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