Day 1
You awoke to find that she had transformed into a cloud. Puffy and off-white.
Where her hands had been there was cool condensing mist. Where her fingertips
had been there was air, a dry stalk that grew in circumference as her path followed
its, a kind of passive groping that arguably extended as far as the horizon. Besides
that, the elements were with her, and her mind was clear as day; clearer, in fact.
Some in the sky had striations, as though they had given birth, and had wanted to
follow their first born into the golden dripping dawn. The previous day began to
return to you, casually, without the hesitation or strain that sometimes afflicts
memory and leaves the rememberer in the loom-woven thicket of its folds. It took
the form of a thought: as jaded as you had become, you had been chasing rainbows.
Any irresponsibility you may have felt, any sense of regret at your own callousness
had now been purified, distilled. Anything left over would rain down from her. That you knew. Only the felt presence of others watching, the cloud-watchers, the storm-chasers and dreamers, posed some momentary distraction. They weren’t all good—there were oglers, voyeurs, peeping Toms, roving eyes, embarrassed souls. The wrong batch of friends. She didn’t deserve that. To be seemingly squashed between the thumb and forefinger of some conspiracy theorist. There were idealists whose own soul-mirrors reflected back, to meet at some point in infinity, Ra (periodic abbreviation).
That’s to be expected if you’re embodied. But this, this experience felt like the
beginning of a new way of defining freedom as a cloud floating free, and did it
matter if the result was circular? The point was that no matter the direction of their
gaze, there was no penetration, no swallowing up or devouring whole, no possibility of an enclosing embrace if the object was air the subject’s arms would clasp and in clasping go through as cleanly as a perfect Katana, no stifling pressure or resentment without outlet.
No one could touch her who hovered above all. You wondered how long it would take her to drift out over NYC or whether she would evaporate before ranging far above the pedestrian heads, cyclists and flower delivery guys, Amazon trucks and interns, the homeless sheltered in cardboard tents, the burbling fountains of sketches whose meth-induced catcalls would fail to reach her, the floating skeletons whose deafening failed imitations of the sound of the human heart beating as music whose waves would thin out like stretched taffy as they popped would likewise fail to reach her.
In the thin air she might become there would be silence. Those pictures of jostling crowds of men in bowler hats, no more. That, or she might walk (why not just assign it a new private meaning? walking as experience through motion) out above a pasture, a green field somewhere in Middle America, where she might just observe the spots of cows. One or two or three. Black or white or brown. This is what it means to not be afraid, this is freedom from.
Day 0
‘It’s in how they walk, how they carry themselves with such confidence, it seems
with too much purpose, or more precisely too much commitment to whatever
purpose(s) they have, or perhaps overly precisely, with too much commitment to
whatever purpose(s) they assume others attribute to them’, she had commented on
your last time together. –‘Then what about you, isn’t your purpose to survive—to
walk to the car so you can commute to class, to eat a sandwich so you can teach—
and what if you had to take care of an elderly relative? Then wouldn’t your purpose
be to make their last days or weeks or whatever little easier, more bearable?’ you
asked, and stooped down to caress the unfolded petals of a giant yellow flower in
the manicured flowerbed of a law office. –‘I’m beginning to not understand my own criticisms, but my own purpose is not survival, rather I’m producing something that expresses part of the soul—don’t pick it!’ –‘I’m only petting it, you usually don’t see one so giant’. –‘Maybe the idea is that someone who seems so committed to a purpose betrays a falsely unified will, which they then parade before others’. – ‘What’s wrong with having a unified will?’ –‘”Falsely” is the key word; in reality people are more fractured than they seem. It’s nice out now but over the weekend the temperature is supposed to drop by twenty-five degrees, we’ll see if the cherry blossoms stay on the trees, but you still do want to go to the festival in Wooster Square I’m assuming...When they bloom, I’m talking at the height, which you have to be vigilant to catch, they fall all over pink and white like clouds, like nature whispering something so beautiful into your ears that you can’t understand’. –‘I don’t know, we’ll see’.
‘Maybe you are too attached to trying to find anything meaningful’, you sighed, but it was a sort of sigh only transparent to yourself, a sort of premonition that there would come a time of having no friends at all, no relations, only airy substances transpiring through the sky, there would be a time when no one needed to confess to others, to mirror in each others eyes like souls, a time of being done with social roles and expectations though it wouldn’t be in the afterlife, after this life with its trivial worries of how to sound and whether you’ve raised your eyebrows quite high enough if you find yourself in wonder, whether in banging on the makeup in the mirror after last night’s too-tame liaison you think to yourself how pointless it was even to wake up out of bed and raise yourself up on your elbows as your cat demands it mopmops and eyes the bowl, and your elbows on the cushions ache from last night hovering on the glass table where they kept spreading lines of coke and everyone was thick with sex and chatter in their gaze and everyone who had come expected you to follow suit but you didn’t, yet you didn’t say no either, and you didn’t say no for her as obviously she could make her own decisions, obviously, leaving you in this sort of position no one ever told you about, not mom or dad, not the therapist not the therapist who said to float like a cloud above all, not your professors or the internet, that you felt like a kind of sailboat with no wind.
She had died that year, but her spirit made no sound, not to you, and then if you
waited the girl you loved appeared, aimless, contemplative, who thought like you
even the darkest thoughts—was that why her ‘friends’ explored so much, the caving, the drinking and partying, these desperate attempts if not to flee the self entirely then to enlarge it to the absolute bursting point, how did it really differ from the balloon you held in your hand, the child’s helium against the sky, a lamprey on the side of a tank, groveling, sucking, deranging itself and being deranged until there was no more left, nothing left to feel like, nothing to be for there was no more of this we call ‘I’ and ‘mine’, but clouds, dust, sand, wind, air, breath, mood, pulse, grass, leaf, the errant and riotous laughter of rainbows thickening on in the purity of afternoon’s defiled rages...and to be like that, to be like that what would any violence have meant...
You could never have conveyed it at the crosswalk with your friend that day.
Day ?
Clouds were beings who reveled in becoming: white buffalo waves emerging
across the changing sky, flagships taking the shape—always particular—however
humans below might misconstrue them, pointing up at this one and that as they
billowed together in their own chaotic star-fed dough. Animals, grump-faces. She
learned that the tension of being a particular cloud released itself by storming a
procession of ideas before Ra, though it ended in squabbling and tears, collective
groaning and lightning, ultimately being yoked again by a rainbow before the skies
cleared. At which point its repetition would remind of her of a previous life. How the people would be concerned about their fields, tomato plants, sunflowers which had already gotten too much rain—albeit rain of an unknown quality which came from a solid green cloud with an curved trunk that seemed to encourage its lamentations by means of an abrupt swinging motion. No matter. The clouds held together as the farmer swore and shook his metallic fists. Sit there and philosophize and have as your purpose survival, but the divine and mythic feminine moved south with them, away from endless soybean fields and toward a small house on a hill in Middle America. Though fully cloud, she could still recognize the child who looked out of her bedroom window each night, his eyes filled with hope and desperation. She could never have afforded NYC.
Anonymous, unobserved, clouds moved towards the widow by the window in the other room, as though to jut their pain between them.
David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.