I Look Up

Look up and the sky 

has hung cumulus paintings

of spilled milk from stratus spools

of white silk fringed with sunlight.

Others are so vast they swallow birds

and planes alike, or spread themselves 

as sheets of new paper that I might write

you a Dear John letter upon.

Later, they descend from galleries

to flatten their mood over fields: a menace

or a comfort. Or lifted to a better view, are splayed 

as scales, backlit with blue ocean, of cirrocumulus.

Some have risen, concrete towers of grey

from the earth with the density of heartache,

but as the day darkens, they morph again,

wisped to more spectral waves of cirrus.

At midnight, in the absence of stars,

the moon elects to peer her glass eye through them.

When the air is thin, I part the atmosphere in drifts,

I look up 

when I cannot look down.

 
Image is my own of the not very pink at all moon of a couple of nights ago.