1.
Today’s clouds were low and disgruntled,
my mood ink-washed across the sky.
They were born yesterday and are
already dying, too heavy to bear
their life-giving water another hour.
2.
Each cloud is a conclave of uneasy molecules
and fraught agendas. A pair of clouds may appear
before you with distinct names and personalities
until they collide, from which point they are one
and have no memory to the contrary.
3.
I found wings and sat in a cloud, blinded
on all sides. The cold touched me everywhere.
A strong gust buoyed me beyond the arc
of the silent white globe, where the stars
lay just out of reach.
4.
A cloud weighs tons, more than your car,
more than the house you don’t own,
heavier than anything you have felt, hanging
beyond reach in impossible freedom.
5.
Though I have never seen a face in a cloud,
I did smash a beer bottle on the ground making
a supernova of spangled glass and stale foam
that gazed up at me with my mother’s eyes.
6.
Deep in its innermost heart, every cloud longs
to live beyond the span of its rain, to respire
and replenish infinitely until nothing that lives
recalls a time before it. A cloud is aware
of the moon, and envies it.
7.
A cloud followed me home. It shrank itself
into the confines of my kitchen and beaded
the coffeemaker with droplets. It then found
my oldest chair, curled up and went to sleep.
Excerpts from the Cloudspotter’s Journal
Dan Wiencek is a poet, critic and humorist who lives in Portland, Oregon, and whose work has appeared in Sou’wester, New Ohio Review, Timberline Review, Carve and other publications. His first collection of poems, Routes Between Raindrops, was published by First Matter Press in 2021.