When Clouds and Poetry Seem to Rhyme

Clouds have always intrigued me. They’re like immense art murals on giant walls that you walk past every day without giving them thought. But I give them thought all the time. I try to decipher them. I take photos, hoping that later I can crack their mysterious code. I can’t help taking them personally, learning their names and causes. The evanescent formation mystify and grab me, as if they’re trying to say something to me. So of course, I write about them.

I Can’t Stop Naming the Clouds

Ice pellets making hieroglyphics, spilling secrets.
Though I can’t read them, I stare,
feeling them as drifting thoughts or
distant town heralds calling and foretelling
news too big for me to perceive.

Cumulus, nimbostratus, undulatus
asperitas. Noctilucent clouds, mare’s tail,
mesospheric bubbles and nets of cream
floating over the town the way love
and sorrow float within me like giant pudgy babies of emotion.
Dressed in white and shade, they form
my perceived self only for moments,
while misty to my companions.

Then they leave, strange conjunctions
of texture and light, rolling away
a whole sentence of experience,
of wishes and insights, here and gone
like tides, leaving their imprints
etched in bone, the what was
making space for what comes.
We are such vanishing stuff.
If only we had as pretty names.

More poems and essays from Rachel Dacus