Chasing Clouds
Forest Muran
Rushing out to reach with outstretched arms,
this clearly super-preternatural, pale form
that emerged one day from some elemental,
though essentially unremembered horizon
from a distance,
seeing it merge as one with sunlight,
and readily vanishing here and there
between scandalizing blue,
basically beautiful,
like seeing something pure for once, levitating,
but lost within an obscure sky.
As though floating up from some great, forgotten mouth,
equipped with a coquettish cigarette from which it quickly, and quietly, puffs,
like a cruel, amorous machine dug out of some deep, dangerous dream,
releasing a vague, ashen kiss of mist,
sent up straight to the sky-blue ceiling, white puffs of puerile stuff,
reflective organisms bound to the dark throat of origins,
the forgotten stratus formed within silver fogs of possessive peaks
from which they know they cannot return.
And then this nauseating horizon gives importance to wispy questions,
the white nebulae now released on cloud six,
now floating in a seemingly forever sky,
always aware of that limping inevitability,
that hypothesis in haze that touches all things,
the understanding that those first puffed
must invariably all be snuffed,
and reach their own sparkling end.
– (Now it’s the end), was it good?
And we all know that the looming sun’s shadow
shall spread across the surface like a little, pouting lip,
will one day unfold itself upon our great, frantic forests and cities,
diverting all memory of sensation toward one, singular point of solace.
But we will rush, arms outstretched,
keeping up with our drifting dreams.