CLOUD-WATCHING

Cumulus clouds stretch horizontal,

slow moving, gas-filled chrysanthemums

cut at the base with a razor blade's

slice; the same way your youth, slow-blooming,

drifted into blueness when you married.

A schoolboy, you studied calculus

in college, could measure the surface of seashell

with a formula, diagram the movements

of cloud banks with charcoal;

But you traced the spine of the nautilus

growing in her belly with wonder,

confused by the imprecision of her cycle,

the rapid division of life cells in her uterus.

You were frightened but did the math,

got married, and your son uncurled

seven months after sacrament,

cloud edges softening into smoke,

floating into Cirrus curls

like the wisps of cigar smoke you blew when

you gave your son your own name.

Moving your family west to work for Del Monte,

you controlled the annual yield

of the tomato plant, watched the fruit get mashed

into paste, scraped into bottles, and shipped across

the States with their sticky profits measured by your

slide-rule. Your wife was expecting another baby,

this time the gammic mass was a girl who grew

too feminine, filled with moods

and a gibbous moon.

You were an angle in a house full of tears.

Made into strangeness, you bought a sailboat,

and that slender woman carried you lonely

across glass water. You learned to watch the clouds

to learn the weather. Your wife's hair became

a black halo like the Latin �Nimbus, stormcloud.

You cut anchor when she screamed silence,

found that stars are smaller above the Pacific,

sky crushes architecture to cement stumps.

Her tempest sent hail through the living-room

while you tried to navigate. So you drifted:

filled your hand with a glass of brandy,

and drank the amber liquid from the life line

in your palm until the bite of the brandy

put clouds in your eyes, cumulus whispers

of the calculus you left behind, the numbers you

never counted, defying your knowledge of function.

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