Trying to Remember the List of Cloud Types

As I was going through them, the cirrus and the nimbostratus, with its white steps like the descending marble ones in my dream last night, I tried to imagine all the forms vapor takes as it rises into the cold, before it is classified. Certainly we must have missed a few. I bring this problem to my father, but he is busy himself, his hands are full, trying to remember how many ounces of sand were equal to an hour in the Middle Ages. I wonder, he murmurs, if I should subtract a few grains, to account for the time it took someone to notice the hour was spent, cross the room, and turn the hourglass over. But if timekeeping used to be inconsistent so that sometimes before the past was repeated a man could exist in one of these pockets for a few moments, uncounted, unregistered, why, I ask, should we correct such a beautiful error? Quite right, says my father, then we should allow the same freedom to your vapor.

The Pardon of Ploërmel

We followed the path into the ravine, while dreaming of orchids. I said one had been sent to my hotel room once in another town, only it wasn’t a hotel, it was a hospital. This was back in the years of hope abandoned, and it had surprised me — how its petals looked touched with heat, seared just enough to change color. The question was also who had sent it, what compelled a man in ward five to send me his compliments. Until it became clear his room was empty; a young florist filled a dead man’s standing order. And this orchid from another world, it was not mine of course. I am a substitute for the woman who’d held my room before, who was not there to marvel at the wind coming through our open window, or complain about the draft, or see our petals refusing to be blown, standing still rather than falling off or turning to powder.

Paros

1

There’s a place to go sailing behind the mountains.                                                                       
They rent the boats there.

I tell my father this, but he will not listen.                                                                                      
Instead he lines our street with buckets.

His buckets will outlive my mother                                                                                                    
whom he won in the end
by questioning.

Imagine being a Lazarus who
resurrects too quickly, without rationing momentum                                                                
gently over the prescribed three days.

Four, my mother said. It took four days.                                                                                                    
But then I remember she caught
his eye in the morning light,

with a silence that said—
You are right darling, four is too much.

2

Then they joked about a Lazarus Soap Co.
“Reborn with every bath” is not a bad slogan,
my mother said,
and this is still the recording I have of her laughter.

3

You must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star,                                                              
said Nietzsche, I say unto you:

you still have chaos within.

This explains perfectly why

unable to pluck the plum of Samarkand,                                                                                               
Babur turned south from his empire                                                                                                                 
and wrote his autobiography.

I only understood this years later
when I took a bath with someone for the first time.                                                                                  
The boy, to make me smile,
took a bite out of the bar of soap

hungrily, as if it were a pear.

Then he eased himself back
as if to affirm this was a world of illusion, and he saw

no choice but to accept everything as a hoax—
the same way that, eventually, glass lantern panes all crack                                                                
to let the calm night flood in.

Afternoon in a Claude Glass

A grasshopper stares at me backward, to soothe his painter’s eye.

He lives on thin ice.

Counting his steps to a wet leaf, like a mathematician in training he is adamant

That it take exactly two thousand until he arrives and bows

Amazed at it being there, bravely still cupping an oval of water, so long after rainfall. 

I am green when seen in reflection, as the rocks and the sky are green, as everything is

Made darker and darker by the apocalyptic tinting in this liquid dusk

That seems not to bother the grasshopper at all, but instead calm him into lying down

Sphinx-like on his spindle thighs, content with the end of the too big, too bright.

He nods approvingly at the dying of his world into a painting,

Looks on coolly as Sequoias plunge down to their cheap silhouettes,

Drowned and neutered because, he reasons,

This is the price and recompense of perfect weather.