22 October 2023

By Philip Kuepper

Immaculate white,
clouds race northeast
toward the sea.
The sky is azure,
the color of a sea.
Allow me, then, to call the clouds
boats: rowboat, coracle, skiff,
a smack,
a ship with sails, a liner,
a scow, a coal barge.
Plug-in to your poet’s imagination,
an imagine an immaculate
white coal barge. Ah,
and a trawler out fishing the heavenly sea
for angelfish. What next?
No, there isn’t an oil tanker cloud.
Imagine were it to become grounded on the sky.
What a mess of a spill, a sky raining oil.
Here does, however, come a cloud yacht
parading augustly across the October sky.
“Ahoy, there, mate!” Not a chance,
as I paddle wildly the canoe
of my imagination toward it.
It sniffs past me, prow held high.
So here I am, in my cloud canoe,
out in the middle of nowhere sky.
Oh, well. Being a cloud,
I can always just evaporate.

(8 October 2023)