Cloud Eater, The

The bunting of the side stage curls up just as

Cassandra's throne is torn apart like the frays in egg drop soup.

But, no, more violent-slit by arrows,

until a dune descends

and an estuary fills

to separate the brine from clouds filling with clouds,

to tighten far below the pleats of the mushroom

until high above us a bridge, improvised,

pours into a dissolving mountain

and concusses through spume

beneath the smoke that stars make

as generations fill the gap where

a cloud meadow drifts,

waiting all this time until

ink is drawn up out of paper

to where a new cloud gathers itself and puckers like an

inoculation site,

and this-where did it leave us,

the lowest waterfall spilling arrows

below the summit,

below the charcoal drawing of reluctance

or here on the slope of the facing mountain,

its newsprint sliding,

a portion of sky the color

of an ice chest harboring fish scales

and silt-all this

in a cupola where seasons speculate,

where the grey rust that is not so much a substance as a mark of abuse

without the persistence of a scar

turns into an airy flume,

a draft unending,

the storm slitting daylight, and we are not changed after all,

and we look into the orchestra that surges

toward us even as

the shovel crushes the white flame,

the brush spreads the ashes,

the electric eel twitches in icy beads

making horizons in horizons,

as if seconds were made to be seen,

cream clotting in lemon, and

over the shaded edge

populations swell in synchronous air,

and then the whole prospect turns over, and we ask:

how did that spume start, that backward running funnel,

that timepiece over the peaks,

those evaporating age spots?

and on this side why are we rowed past

an infinity of mist,

something past free-while

this, held aloft,

endures change,

emblems sliding into deeper emblems as

our endless greed for time is exposed,

and the belief, felt, intentioned,

that we have always been and never exactly started, at most unfolded into

this pouring avalanche of vapor

that tries the mind on

with the muslin of a tall dream,

beyond the roof of the mouth

or the high snow,

grey-eyed, green-tinged, dolphin-backed pantomime,

not the future but the past turned over,

advancing, loading up its ark and taking all our shapes.

LEE UPTON'S poetry and fiction appear widely. Her fourth book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in 2005.

photograph by Theodora Ziolkowski

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