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A blue stain creeps across the deep pile of the evergreens. From inside the forest it seems like an interior matter, something wholly to do with trees, a color passed from one to another, a requirement to which they submit unflinchingly like soldiers or brave people getting older. Then the sun comes back and it’s totally over.

The day is dark and the night To him that would search their heart; No lips of cloud that will part Nor morning song in the light: Only, gazing alone, To him wild shadows are shown, Deep under deep unknown And height above unknown height. Still we say as we go,i "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day." The Past is over and fled; Nam'd new, we name it the old; Thereof some tale hath been told, But no word comes from the dead; Whether at all they be, Or whether as bond or free, Or whether they too were we, Or by what spell they have sped. Still we say as we go,i "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day." What of the heart of hate That beats in thy breast, O Time?i Red strife from the furthest prime, And anguish of fierce debate; War that shatters her slain, And peace that grinds them as grain, And eyes fix'd ever in vain On the pitiless eyes of Fate. Still we say as we go,i "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day." What of the heart of love That bleeds in thy breast, O Man?i Thy kisses snatch'd 'neath the ban Of fangs that mock them above; Thy bells prolong'd unto knells, Thy hope that a breath dispels, Thy bitter forlorn farewells And the empty echoes thereof? Still we say as we go,i "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day." The sky leans dumb on the sea, Aweary with all its wings; And oh! the song the sea sings Is dark everlastingly. Our past is clean forgot, Our present is and is not, Our future's a seal'd seedplot, And what betwixt them are we?i We who say as we go,i "Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day."

1 The clouds part revealing a mythology of clouds assembled in light of earliest birds, an originary text over water over time, and that without which the clouds part revealing an apology for clouds implicit in the air where the clouds had been recently witnessed rehearsing departure, a heartfelt phrase in the push of the airborne drops and crystals over water over time—how being made to think oneself an obstruction between the observer and the object or objects under surveillance or even desired—or if I am felt to be beside the point then I have wanted that, but to block a path is like not being immaterial enough, or being too much when all they want from you now is your station cleared of its personal effects please and vanish— not that they’d ever just come out and say it when all that darting around of the eyes, all that shaky camouflage of paper could only portend the beginning of the end of your tenure at this organization, and remember a capacity to draw meaning out of such seeming accidence landed one here to begin with, didn’t it. 2 The clouds part revealing an anatomy of clouds viewed from the midst of human speculation, a business project undertaken in a bid to acquire and retain control of the formation and movement of clouds. As late afternoons I have witnessed the distant towers borrow luster from a bourbon sun, in-box empty, surround sound on, all my money made in lieu of conversation—where conversation indicates the presence of desire in the parties to embark on exchange of spirit, hours forzando with heartfelt phrase— made metaphor for it, the face on the clock tower bright as a meteor, as if a torch were held against likelihood to illuminate the time so I could watch the calm silent progress of its hands from the luxury appointments of my office suite, the tumult below or behind me out of mind, had not my whole attention been riveted by the human figure stood upon the tower’s topmost pinnacle, himself surveying the clouds of the future parting in antiquity, a figure not to be mistaken, tranquilly pacing a platform with authority: the chief executive officer of clouds. 3 The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces which, prior to the factories’ recent construction, provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons, a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement. Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence of any competing sound, its origin and its character. It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture provoke in an audience more positive, lasting response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature. Even those who consider natural clouds products of conscious manufacture seem to prefer that a merely human mind lie behind the products they admire. This development may be a form of self-exalting or else another adaptation in order that we find the hum of machinery comforting through darkness. 4 The clouds part revealing there’s no place left to sit myself down except for a single wingback chair backed into a corner to face the window in which the clouds part revealing the insouciance of clouds cavorting over the backs of the people in the field who cut the ripened barley, who gather it in sheaves, who beat grain from the sheaves with wooden flails, who shake it loose from the scaly husk around it, who throw the now threshed grain up into the gently palm-fanned air whose steady current carries off the chaff as the grain falls to the floor, who collect the grain from the floor painstakingly to grind it into flour, who bake the flour into loaves the priest will offer in the sanctuary, its walls washed white like milk. To perform it repeatedly, to perform it each time as if the first, to walk the dim corridor believing that the conference it leads to might change everything, to adhere to a possibility of reward, of betterment, of moving above, with effort, the condition into which one has been born, to whom do I owe the pleasure of the hum to which I have been listening too long. 5 The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds, believers in people, ideas and things, the workers of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase and belief you can change with water over time. It is the habit of a settled population to give ear to whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out by human experience, for most things people desire have been desired ardently for thousands of years and observe—they are no closer to realization today than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow. Attempts to speed them on have been undertaken from the beginning; plans to force them overnight are in copious, antagonistic operation today, and yet they have thoroughly eluded us, and chances are they will continue to elude us until the clouds part in a flash of autonomous, ardent, local brainwork— but when the clouds start to knit back together again, we’ll dismiss the event as a glitch in transmission. 6 The clouds part revealing a congregation of bodies united into one immaterial body, a fictive person around whom the air is blurred with money, force from which much harm will come, to whom my welfare matters nothing. I sense without turning the light from their wings, their eyes; they preen themselves on the fire escape, the windowsill, their pink feet vulnerable—a mistake to think of them that way. If I turn around, the room might not be full of wings capable of acting, in many respects, as a single being, which is to say that I myself may be the source of what I sense, but am no less powerless to change it. Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them and their love of money, everything I do without thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable. 7 The clouds part revealing the distinction between words without meaning and meaning without words, a phenomenon of nature, the westbound field of low air pressure developing over water over time and warm, saturated air on the sea surface rising steadily replaced by cold air from above, the cycle repeating, the warm moving upward into massive thunderclouds, the cold descending into the eye around which bands of thunderclouds spiral, counter- clockwise, often in the hundreds, the atmospheric pressure dropping even further, making winds accelerate, the clouds revolve, a confusion of energy, an incomprehensible volume of rain—I remember the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes against an asphalt wall, my vision of it scrolling left as the crowd thinned out to a spatter and then just black until I fall asleep and then just black again, past marketing, past focus groups, past human resources, past management, past personal effects, their insignificance evident in the eye of the dream and through much of the debriefing I wake into next.

To fish from a cloud in the sky You must find a comfortable spot, Spend a day looking down Patiently, clear-sighted. Peer at your ceiling: Where a light dangles, hook & line Could be slipping through. Under the hull of a boat A fish will see things this way, Looking up while swimming by — A wavering pole’s refraction Catching its eye. What will you catch? With what sort of bait? Take care or you’ll catch yourself, A fish might say, As inescapable skeins of shadow Scatter a net Over the face of the deep.

It approaches from the sea, too small For thunder and lightning But ominous as a closed fist And what it will bring Nearing us, growing larger, Is completely unknown.

I keep returning to John Constable’s Study of Clouds. Oil on cardboard, six by seven and a half inches, it shows purple-gray thunderheads, one patch of blue, above low hills and two small trees flanked by shrubs in the left foreground. A sketch en plein air, a half hour’s worth of work at most, it catches exactly one scrap of sky and shifting sunlight on a blustery day in 1820. The year King George the Third died in Windsor Castle, blind and insane, the year 50,000 Scottish weavers went on strike and printed a proclamation calling for a new “provisional government.” Their leaders were caught, hanged, and then decapitated for good measure. This cloud study survived that history. Two minutes later, the clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shape just like the thunderheads now piling up above the Liffey. I hobble out of the Dublin City Gallery, take a bus to the river, sit on a park bench with a ziplock bag of ice on my swollen knee. Its wet cold makes the joint ache. My body is breaking down, bone spur under the right kneecap. At fifty-eight, I watch young men and women in black sweats run along the River Liffey — Abha na Life, Anna Liffey, river that crosses the plains of Life. I envy them. Once I too could run over the asphalt, almost without knowing I inhabited a body whose knees might seize up and swell. I will not run again in this life. Cirrus and cumulonimbus scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. Sun’s blazon through rain rampant, my life is a cloud study for some larger landscape John Constable never got around to painting. It hangs in a gilded frame. People stare at it before passing on to more important canvases, to Renoir’s Les Parapluies, women and men opening shiny black umbrellas in a Paris park. There a mother shelters her two daughters under an umbrella meant for one. The younger daughter holds a wooden hoop she has been rolling along tamped dirt paths, whipping it with a stick to keep it spinning, before the rain settled in. Renoir painted this small family in his lush, impressionistic style. Five years later, after visiting Italy and studying Piero della Francesca’s frescoes, he came back and finished the painting in his new “manière aigre” or harsh style. He handled the gray silk folds of the auburn-haired woman’s dress on the left as if they were granite to be sculpted. She carries a market basket filled to the brim with shadow. To approach old age, one needs a new, harsher style. Here, by the Liffey, mothers push screaming infants in strollers. Five teenagers in blue jeans and bright yellow or green raincoats walk by, joking, texting on cell phones, smoking. One girl and her boy hang back, embrace, French-kiss a long ten seconds. Another boy shouts over his shoulder, “Get a room!” A pair of mute swans preens and swims down the River Liffey, whose amber waters mirror how the clouds pass, avalanche of cumulus that hangs forever on the burnished unrippling surface of my memory — vast sky surf, cloud after cloud cresting, breaking to be washed away to blue nothing. Each of us — lovers, mothers, runners, me — no more than windblown swansdown.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder. I sift the snow on the mountains below, And their great pines groan aghast; And all the night 'tis my pillow white, While I sleep in the arms of the blast. Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers, Lightning my pilot sits; In a cavern under is fettered the thunder, It struggles and howls at fits; Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion, This pilot is guiding me, Lured by the love of the genii that move In the depths of the purple sea; Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills, Over the lakes and the plains, Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream, The Spirit he loves remains; And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile, Whilst he is dissolving in rains. The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead; As on the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of its golden wings. And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and of love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depth of Heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine aëry nest, As still as a brooding dove. That orbèd maiden with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the Moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, By the midnight breezes strewn; And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, Which only the angels hear, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, The stars peep behind her and peer; And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Till calm the rivers, lakes, and seas, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, Are each paved with the moon and these. I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl. From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, Over a torrent sea, Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, The mountains its columns be. The triumphal arch through which I march With hurricane, fire, and snow, When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, Is the million-coloured bow; The sphere-fire above its soft colours wove, While the moist Earth was laughing below. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.

The morning comes, and thickening clouds prevail, Hanging like curtains all the horizon round, Or overhead in heavy stillness sail; So still is day, it seems like night profound; Scarce by the city’s din the air is stirred, And dull and deadened comes its every sound; The cock’s shrill, piercing voice subdued is heard, By the thick folds of muffling vapors drowned. Dissolved in mists the hills and trees appear, Their outlines lost and blended with the sky; And well-known objects, that to all are near, No longer seem familiar to the eye, But with fantastic forms they mock the sight, As when we grope amid the gloom of night.

The clouds as I see them, rising urgently, roseate in the mounting of somber power surging in evening haste over roofs and hermetic grim walls— Last night as if death had lit a pale light in your flesh, your flesh was cold to my touch, or not cold but cool, cooling, as if the last traces of warmth were still fading in you. My thigh burned in cold fear where yours touched it. But I forced to mind my vision of a sky close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move— a sky of gray mist it appeared— and how looking intently at it we saw its gray was not gray but a milky white in which radiant traces of opal greens, fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again, and how only then, seeing the color in the gray, a field sprang into sight, extending between where we stood and the horizon, a field of freshest deep spiring grass starred with dandelions, green and gold gold and green alternating in closewoven chords, madrigal field. Is death’s chill that visited our bed other than what it seemed, is it a gray to be watched keenly? Wiping my glasses and leaning westward, clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning into myself to see the colors of truth I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.

It is windy today. A wall of wind crashes against, windows clunk against, iron frames as wind swings past broken glass and seethes, like a frightened cat in empty spaces of the cellblock. In the exercise yard we sat huddled in our prison jackets, on our haunches against the fence, and the wind carried our words over the fences, while the vigilant guard on the tower held his cap at the sudden gust. I could see the main tower from where I sat, and the wind in my face gave me the feeling I could grasp the tower like a cornstalk, and snap it from its roots of rock. The wind plays it like a flute, this hollow shoot of rock. The brim girded with barbwire with a guard sitting there also, listening intently to the sounds as clouds cover the sun. I thought of the day I was coming to prison, in the back seat of a police car, hands and ankles chained, the policeman pointed, “See that big water tank? The big silver one out there, sticking up? That’s the prison.” And here I am, I cannot believe it. Sometimes it is such a dream, a dream, where I stand up in the face of the wind, like now, it blows at my jacket, and my eyelids flick a little bit, while I stare disbelieving. . . . The third day of spring, and four years later, I can tell you, how a man can endure, how a man can become so cruel, how he can die or become so cold. I can tell you this, I have seen it every day, every day, and still I am strong enough to love you, love myself and feel good; even as the earth shakes and trembles, and I have not a thing to my name, I feel as if I have everything, everything.