DANA GIOIA

“Flying Over Clouds”

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No earthly image—only clouds,

affluent clouds, seen from high above,

still bright at the approach of evening.

Soft valleys hidden in a snowdrift,

waterfalls of ice and air,

not whiteness but a dream of whiteness,

an innocence one may have felt

on earth—but only for a moment,

waking unexpectedly at dawn

one winter morning after a storm

to find the shabby blacktopped streets

immaculate in sunlight, glossed

by deep smooth banks of snow, before

the earliest car or footfall.

                                         So strange,

this world the ancients never saw,

and yet their words now come to mind,

nimbus, cirrus, cumuli,

magic names to summon all

the scattered elements of air.

O paradise beyond the glass,

beyond our touch, cast and recast,

shifting in wind. Delicate world

of air too thin to breathe, of cold

beyond endurance.

                               And nothingness

that mirrors our desire—not of death

but of your fluent oblivion,

of insubstantial dusk and dawn,

your whiteness burning in the sun.

The plane flies westward gaining time.

The dark recedes—pand up ahead

the sky is cloudless, clear, and bright.