Cloud

    —from The Attack on Humanity
        written on an Aspen parking permit

There’s sometimes more to place
Than just the mask of any face:

I am more by space defined
Than by any identity I find,

And the whole great planet I might pit
Against the fiction of the intimate,

Putting all my faith in where I am
Rather than that psychic scam,

That cult of me and you
Where only selfish things are true.

Rather than my own blind eye,
I put my trust in growing sky,

In the grim sublime reality –
Not what I think, but what I see,

Taking winds of weather as my guide
(I do not blink: I might decide) –

Lolling on the glacial scree,
Enveloped by pomposity –

The hillock, drumlin, vale, and rill
That nature turns to when it’s still.

Here illusions of the real
Are undercut by teal,

The tawdry rite of day to day
Ripped apart by shades of grey,

Pulling Loch Ness monsters out of ponds
Or colored handkerchiefs from wands:

Philosophy is no excuse
For logic out of Dr. Seuss,

For blaming galaxies of rain
On the presence of the brain

(As if the simple fact of pork
Were dependent on the fork),

Denying that a cosmic hole
Could be greater than the soul,

A world aghast to think that wit
Proposes to impose on it,

Not accepting that instead
The sky is just above our head

And a scudding line of cirrus
Is what the inner landscape really is.

The proper fallacy is to think
The world might vanish when we wink –

The opposite of course is true:
We exist because the sky is blue:

Humanity is minute-made,
A side effect of stellar shade,

The only drawing of the infinite
That the brushes of the air permit.

April 23rd, 2016, Aspen