See how cumulonimbi dress the earth
for dramas passed over by unmoved audiences,
birds clothe salt-marsh and sand-spit, and poems
bear the tender songs of a departing bird.
When the Gentle were dead these inherited their coats
Now they gather in late autumn and quarrel over the air
Hear how birds whisper to the earth
elegies yet unwritten about cumulonimbi,
and clouds and poems rise into ether –
swoosh! – to bicker plainly then disperse.
Demanding something for their shadow that are naked
And silent and learning
Sense the ways poems search the earth
for knowledge of how, like birds
and clouds learning to fly, the word
first formed in air. Together
a cloud, a bird and a poem are considered
with such shape and symmetry as stretch
songs over bone and sky, such colour and vision
as remember the first poem, and all poems since.
As if they are all wing and wisp.
As if they are all spirit and turbulence.
* Found lines from W. S. Merwin’s ‘Crows on the Northern Slope’.
