In Cloud Country
In cloud country, water has but two states: we focus on the crease between a wave and its cold, between us and the sun. In cloud country, your mind settles its mist across the TV’S broken screen, the IV’S taped labels, the metal rungs strung along the bed frame, like ladders into a hidden room. Here, Kyushu is a doorway left ajar, a nightlight’s shadow shift. Here, we admit ourselves the paper’s ninth and impossible fold—the way we say Hello, meaning, Hold on a little longer.
Or, I don’t know, meaning, It’s true. Errant cells spill like sea salt over the corridor’s mirrored linoleum, as we shuffle from floor to floor, and you live long enough to see your glasses return to style, your plaid shirts, your knit cardigans. Within our borders, your hair frays cirrus into sky, while that bride, so serious in every photo, never had to be you. Drowsy, draining through a plastic tube, in cloud country, you say, That was all so long ago: each closet, a mossy gate, each wormwood cabinet, a cabin dissolving in your nowhere backwoods, where the plural is story—the singular, skin, and the notice stapled to the door does not make of one face many. Was there ever a quiet street, a pink bungalow, a trio of hunched maples, a cup of cooling sencha waiting in this nation for you? In cloud country, you say, It feels like I’m being eaten, and choke down spoonfuls of ice cream, lemon Jell-o. We thicken your water with powdered bone. In cloud country, the horizon doesn’t sever the sky, but spills upward, a helix of white smoke, burnt leaves. While the fledglings in our chests bear no desire to leave the nest, or rot to barbed wire, snagged cloth. At this latitude, the textbooks declare the heart an uncracked robin’s egg—the mind, a clever mockingbird’s— and every morning is the morning you showed us the bitterns, curtained by bulrushes, towering in their sleep. You closed our eyes as we passed the one broken on the boulevard.
It is here, in cloud country, that you promise to reveal how to uncrimp each beak from its paper bud, how to unfurl each wing with the perfect pressure of fingers not yet talons, veins not yet tunnels of wind and sleet. It is here that you mutter, I had a name so that we understand: every animal has wings. No dignity in indignity, you kept it all to yourself in cloud country, where the sheets folded you and the crinkled gown exposed you; where the swallows never stood still—and never stood for want. We kept them to ourselves. We kept this for you. You plead, Leave a window open, a skylight unlocked. We flatten our faces against the glass’s double pane. We couldn’t finish those final folds alone. You left us for an image of astounding order. There was no order. We listen to the radio for your whereabouts until we, too, bear throats wracked by static, blistered with Coriolis. The fields that stretch behind the boulevard rise and evaporate easy from their bedrock—now, no different than bed.
In cloud country, it rains newspaper cranes, it cries Fujita scale, it hears your tectonic mumble merge with ours: there is no scale for now and then.
You are the paper’s one hundred and third fold, the nebula’s gauzed edge. In cloud country, you say, Thank you. We say, Thank you.