Fluff

[rejectomorph]

Yesterday afternoon, soft cirrus clouds began to form here and there. By nightfall they had gone. During the night, the sky was periodically swept by denser clouds which blacked out patches of stars. Early light revealed them as great swaths of small, grayish puffs, like roads filled with long parades of shadowy sheep. Dawn now turns them white, and they scatter until the whole sky is filled with flocks. I'd like to lie on the grass and watch them, but I must sleep.



Sunday Verse

Marginalia

by Richard Wilbur

Things concentrate at the edges; the pond-surface
Is bourne to fish and man and it is spread
In textile scum and damask light, on which
The lily-pads are set; and there are also
  Inlaid ruddy twigs, becalmed pine-leaves,
  Air-baubles, and the chain mail of froth.

Descending into sleep (as when the night-lift 
Falls past a brilliant floor), we glimpse a sublime
Decor and hear, perhaps, a complete music,
But this evades us, as in the night meadows
  The crickets' million roundsong dies away
  From all advances, rising in every distance.

Our riches are centrifugal; men compose
Daily, unwittingly, their final dreams,
And those are our own voices whose remote
Consummate chorus rides on the whirlpool's rim,
  Past which we flog our sails, toward which we drift,
  Plying our own trades, in hopes of a good drowning.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

wow. i'd never seen this poem before. wow. "air-baubles" is great, and i love the final stanza, entire. "consummate chorus rides on the whirlpool's rim," mmmmm.

thank you for this. i also like the sky full of flocks of sheep, too. :)