Biography of a Cloud

Gerhard Richter

The Biography of a Cloud

It would have been easier to follow Johnson

from pub to pub with a notebook and pen

or sift through cardboard boxes

crammed with Trollopiana

than to tell the story of this anonymous mass.

It is hard to say even where it was born,

Though considering its thick, whipped texture

And its lofty, processional manner,

I have it somewhere over a large warm body of water,

Fathered by heat, mothered by humidity.

We do know this much;

that it billowed white at the mountain top

and its flat underside was the grey of headstones;

that it slid onto the land and felt its way

over the contours of several western states,

always moving eastward, from left to right

the way the eyes move over print

as if were reading the earth with its blind shadow.

Otherwise it did nothing

but allow itself to be blown through the high cold atmosphere,

though it was always changing shapes

and assumed in its lifetime the form

of Australia, the head of an enormous dog,

a sheep on the run, a hippo with its mouth agape,

and even the camel that passed through the eye of Hamlet.

As usual, its existence was noted only by a few:

a workman eating lunch on a girder,

a woman on a terrace watering plants,

and a large number of people named Riley,

all supine in hammocks or on blankets spread for picnics.

Ordinarily it traveled in a convoy

or pedaled along with one or two companions,

but one early morning over Arizona

it held the distinction of being the only one in the sky.

In the end, it died as all clouds do,

in an obscurity befitting one of the minor English poets,

the son of a London hatter or an Essex clergyman,

sent down from Oxford for heresy or gambling,

soon addicted to laudanum, then the slide into destitution,

for their stories, too, begin to sound alike.

But I would rather track the life of a cloud

than labor over packets of letters

written in a crabbed hand

or explicate the four sorry volumes of verse

he would have left when he died,

gout-ridden on a cot in Wembley.

I prefer a wayside bench, ensnared by vines,

to the dark aisles of a library,

a place to watch them inch across the sky,

caravans plying their ancient trade routes.

I want to train my scholar’s eye

on the bright shifting edges

where the weightless tongues of clouds lick the air.

I want to remove my hat, close my eyes,

And feel the sun, warm and intermittent, on my face.

Billy Collins

"As usual, its existence was noted only by a few.." Isn't that the truth? How often do we stop and look at the clouds? And who ever thought of the lifespan of a cloud - how it is born, where it goes, and all the way through to how it dies? Until this poem, I sure hadn't.