Nova Gold, and: Cloud Patrol

Abstract

Nova Gold Witty, aren't the stars? Tabulating their own rates. They can't look up through their own hair to see another star crossing. Silver wires coming down to set their light. We bought them when they were worth almost nothing. We walked hand in hand in the neighborhood, playing games: he covered my eyes as he led me past all the cracks in the sidewalk, and the shrubbery I had known. We thought it wouldn't last at all. I hulked under blankets. He drove. The car swift across the countryside. Sand flats. Cypress. So far south, noon tilted like amber sunset, heavy-strained through ambivalence. The turns in the clock are a given, but my skull and teeth are so close to the gravel. It's flimsy floorboard between me and road shooting past, eighty miles per hour. The starlight blanked out as soon as it fell to the grass. It shimmered. We tried to catch the feeling of love. In the old days, they didn't know it caused the green and red scarves in northern skies. Slow flames leaping about. Flames cool and large enough to light the mind, but not burn it. [End Page 134] Cloud Patrol There is a long distance ahead of us, so immeasurable I don't see why anyone ever fusses about history. A dark magnetic field presses down over the house, against the windows. I've cooked. My mother away in Paris speaks to her mother. Or my mother will have watched all night out a window at a lurking pine. Maybe a fauteuil that Mimie, my grandmother, will slump in, not rimming her lids with black anymore, or wearing the fox head-stole that will have disintegrated by next century's end. Never mind about the picture in which I can be held on a hip, those foxes and snow clinging where I doubt I'll ever be again. Who sits down to Bach floating out of the kitchen? My mother stepped off a bus to clean her mother's rooms. To haul bags of her father's letters, her mother's diploma to the dumpster. She thought, "Pretend there was a fire." Step down I was saying, picturing her tomorrow, and come back. I suggest a beard I know my brother will never grow. The rain hits the windshield. He gives me the finger as we ride: [End Page 135] Did you know at Agincourt the French archers had their necessary third fingers chopped by the English (who then won)? To antagonize the frogs, the English held up their middle and index fingers. Isn't that crazy? Years ago, I was standing in the kitchen with a letter from Lt. Mark C. to my brother. David said, "Read this," then went to lie on his bed. The basket case, the body-bagged man with the head tucked in near the bits of feet, I was sick - Mark had watched for clouds with my brother on Mount Sinai. Gulf War. The zipper may have split to give view to the salad of organs. Limbs come back to the base. There were only seventeen minutes of rain in fifteen months on Mount Sinai. At the top of a sandy ridge, four men stood watch as cloud patrol and sent up rowdy whoops when one cumulus, a dinner roll or tube of white, fumed into view. What would be formed clear on the desert, on its coasts of constant future. Sand drifted up, mingled with the blue screen, whipped its back like a cat in the desert. Waves of heat, days my brother insists, he read like white lessons of "after." As in, "After this I'll . . ." It's not true that no one really knows what he wants. [End Page 136] On Mount Everest, it wasn't a search for clouds but heights. A winded climber sat among patches of snow, feasting on blue & white and gray mountain vistas. Suddenly, his gaze released circulating clouds, and took up a strangely white...