Nature Memoir X

This one cloud far in the distance, a boat, with a chimney-shaped sail. The edges of so many of them are fractals. Dark on their trears, while on the faces that explode outward from the sun. Its shards and fragments shatter into bristles. Specks, freckles. As the horizon grows more distant, the persepctive curve of it gathers the sky into tight layers until all that can describe it is a blue-gray plasma. In the negative spaces between these closer formations is a sea, a bay, a lake, strait, and ocean. Inverted water bodies in the atmosphere and when they obscure so slightly by a cloud and the sun--shines a corona of rainbow light. So briefly and so short, a sliver of the spectrum overflowing the edges.

As if on tectonic plates these cloud-continents shift or slide or scroll as if you were watching land masses transform over millions of years in only minutes. A temporary escape from the din. A pleasant and almost sad, bittersweet thing, that these noisome faces under them on this soil distracts and bothers me so.

Though they will soon be gone, the grass remains. The clouds still hang, drift, with their turbulent crowns still restlessly changing. The trees patiently stand watch and protect the land. And myself? The bodies around move but they do not. They slowly become a nothing, a kind of collection of creatures I give no second thoughts to. Ants, flies, gnats, things that buzz and move and forgettably vanish. It is time to go.