Ancestral Cloud

(After Kenneth Koch)

A cloud covered in numbered windows
just sailed past, green shutters mostly closed,
like a nativity calendar the first week of December
on a kitchen wall in a tattooed building in Pforzheim.

In its celestial wake,
the larger navigating cloud steered by a stick of a sailor,
a huge tanker of a hotel in the Bay of Naples, in Venice.
It hasn’t been in port for years.

But look! An angel with a dot matrix blush,
tilting its face, jousts past,
is on a blind date with a cirrus! Nimbostratus! Father!
Rain cloud

Morning Glory

A slice of 3-tiered building on a plate.
Tilted balconies on a rococo fondant
afternoon pink baroque neo-classical yellow
evening, ordinary brick municipal in winter,
Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid,
or Boston topped with New Orleans
humidity and chilled skies of Nashua,
BAKERY and Rental Office taped
near the awning of the margin.

Can I have a two-bedroom, thanks.
Nasturtiums, not geraniums in windows,
a baby grand piano in the parlor,
bookshelves with ideas of mechanical precision,
clouds of dream filling the rooms?
until the next person in line orders the Sackler torte:

a man facing the sky is turning blue
on a dirty blanket on the sidewalk
as the hairstylists gather, someone makes the Call.

Groundcover

You use too much detail, apparently, and have been told to not manspread over the ground though you are not a man but a woman, though you notice that others, specifically men, take up acres of paragraphs and stanzas of mulch, case in point, that gardener holding a hose at waist level is overwatering the other flowering plants with you’re such a good listener, I’ve been talking too much, but let me just add, despite that he’s been allotted fourteen acres already for his baby-blue and baby-pink splatters in this rotting violent cruel immoral hateful polluted unhealthy unkind unjust wasteful world in every headline, and because it’s clear you won’t stop, you’re still covering so much ground, the manager with a clipboard at waist level steps in with orders to “Prune clauses, Karen” and he calls you Karen / though / that is not / your name and he barks “Is the thermostat turned up too high in the greenhouse? Because you seem angry, and that’s not good for the nursery” and he has to yell “Speak in gentle, barely audible mists!” because you’re not paying attention to him since he’s no longer relevant to the conversation and instead you observe how in this rotting violent cruel immoral hateful polluted unhealthy unkind unjust wasteful world your lists of detail have been upcycled as trellises and on the trellises bloom fists, we are everywhere, we are the center of the universe, we made you, we are primary and you secondary, we are reconsidering why we made you, what the world needs now is toxic femininity, a kind of weed killer

Paradise

what do the scroll of clouds say
-their changing shapes
over fortune road

a scroll of clouds
when our days were horses
in a horse-shaped morning
before a drapery of trees

the mare, foals, the stallion
everyone had a parent

a barn with stalls, a home to return to
a gas station, a general store
with curtains in the window
a brook that drowned no one

drapes that close
drapes that open

curtains that close
curtains that open

the world is changing
like a scroll of clouds
a manuscript of weather