Indoor Cloudspotting
Yesterday was leadbellied. Bearing down not floating away. A sense of nimbostratus gathering shadows outside the kitchen windows. You tick the box marked ‘chance of rain’. We’re classifying drift, tabulating it into neat rows. Deciding on the exact amount of wisp needed to separate cirrus from cirro-cumulus, mark out the edges of another Tuesday. Constable had it right. Those paintings where the sky’s the only thing alive and moving. Our eyes are drawn to it. Away from dull foregrounds where doors are painted shut. Bodies without surface, someone said. Carrying cathedrals of rain. Sometimes the sun cuts sieve-like holes through us and we can’t hold it any longer, cry stair rods for hours. We’ve made a colour wheel that turns through dolomite and mole to unironed pillowcase, the empty page. Argue into dusk where one shade of loneliness leaches into another. You disagree. Or perhaps I do. It’s hard to tell through perpetual mizzle of low-lying stratus. Sometimes it’s just my own unbodied surface in the darkening glass. This morning is more weasel-backed you say. Though shapes are ill-defined. They lack a latin taxonomy to orient ourselves around. We’re losing count of all our airy citadels, these dragonish days.
Emma Simon has published two pamphlets, Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017) and The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020). Her first collection, Shapeshifting for Beginners will be published by Salt in September this year. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has won the Live Canon, YorkMix, Ver Poets and Prole Laureate prizes.