Sky Writing
It’s all because of clouds.
Poets can’t help themselves. The names of clouds are poetry: Cirro-cumulus, Cumulo-nimbus, Nimbo-stratus, for example. Cirro means wisps of hair, the highest clouds. Cumulo means puffy, or heaped clouds, thunder-heads. (The kind I conjure teddy bears from.) Thin wisps of Cirrus,the highest clouds, are ice crystals, the lowest, fog which comes in on little cat feet. We all know that.
I’ve been in the North Woods of Minnesota, can you tell? The sky is wide, the cornfields wide, and so are the barns. I miss that sky. I miss lake sunsets, and loons hailing one another at dusk. When I’m in Asheville, I miss the Minnesota sky. When I’m in Minnesota, I miss the mountain sky. I’m always missing.
When clouds fill the sky, words appear on my page. I call this sky writing. When I lived in Minnesota (14 years) and didn’t write about the sky, friends wondered if I was all right.
I’m not the only sky writer. Here’s poem #895 by Emily Dickinson.
A Cloud withdrew from the Sky
Superior Glory be
But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries
Are forever lost to me
Had I but further scanned
Had I secured the Glow
In an Hermetic Memory
It had availed me now.
Never to pass an Angel
With a glance and a Bow
Till I am firm in Heaven
Is my intention now.
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Cloud, a seven verse wonder. Here is the first verse. Perhaps you will read the rest online.
The Cloud
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.
From The Poetry of Zen, translated and edited by Sam Hamill and J. P. Seaton, we find this 8th century poem by Han Shan.
The gorge is long, rocks, and rocks and rocks jut up.
The torrent’s wide, reeds almost hide
the other side.
The moss is slippery even without rain.
The pines sing; the wind is real enough.
Who’s ready to leaf free of the world’s traces:
come sit with me among white clouds?
From a later Zen poet, Chinese writer Ching An (1851-1912)
Returning Clouds
Misty trees hide in crinkled hills’ blue green.
The man of the Way’s stayed long
at this cottage in the bamboo grove.
White clouds too know the flavor
of this mountain life;
they haven’t waited for the vesper bell
to come on home again.
This poem was written while I listened to an orchestra perform Hovhanness’s Mysterious Mountain.
Mysterious Mountain
I live in clouds,
snakes of them at my feet,
a cool scarf of them around my face.
This mountain
could be the heaven I’ve waited for.
Below the summit, clouds obscure
the top.
From above,
I see only the mountain shining.
Today my mountain is cloud covered. (Sounds like a poem!) Autumn is on its way. I look forward to the sky.
