Cloud Cover

In the fall, in West Virginia, there are always clouds. They lay in a thick blanket usually, covering the horizon in layers of gray. When I get my son out of his crib in the morning, I always look out his window to assess the clouds. Sometimes they are pulling apart in the middle with the blush of dawn making the sky look like cotton candy. Or perhaps they are lumpy, like handfuls of crumpled tissue. But often they are black and forboding, with no definition to tell the difference between cloud and sky. It is just the dark warning of the coming rain.

Cloud cover is oppressive I think. It presses down on you and causes the molecules in your body to realign into something harder and impermeable, becoming resistant to the rain. It is no wonder that we often compare storms to life's trials. They press you into something different, too. Makes your skin thick and even calloused sometimes. Makes your mind bend in a direction you never thought it would go. Makes you wrap your arms around your head and close your eyes tight so you can't see things around you at all. Clouds and trials seem to limit your space, as if you are bound up in a tiny box.

I think change is good. I am not a particular fan, and I don't seek change out usually, but sometimes you change, and maybe aren't aware of it until the change is complete. When I was younger, perhaps in my 20s, I was a totally different person than I am now. I was more diffuse, parts of me scattered everywhere. Then life came in all its various forms of clouds, pressing me into something much more solid and orderly. I understand myself much better now, and I know why I feel the way I feel.

So, clouds and rain, whether in life or on the literal horizon, do press you down, and even though painful at the time, they change you, often into something that is much more unbreakable. Stronger.

Just so your know, this morning when I got Ethan out of his crib, there were actually no clouds in the sky. Good sign. I am wide open today. But if the rain comes, I will be ready.

Aurora

When you think of me,
When your mind
Takes a path, stepping
Backward, foot behind foot,
Watching for flashes of
Me, in the periphery
Of memory,

I wonder if you notice
I am diffuse;
Particles sliding
Past one another,
Movement fluid
Like the pumping
Of oiled pistons,
An unrelenting
Shifting of elements.

If you try and
Hold me,
Like something
Concrete,
I fall through
Your fingers,
Grains of sand,
Bits of something
Once larger and
Dense, without
Space and shadow.

When you find me,
Finally,
A sky blazing with
Dissipating light,
Fragments on fire
With comet tails
Full of pieces of me
Left
From another time,

Please excuse me
If I don’t stay.
I am fading
Again.