Revisionist Poetry – “Under a White, Watching Sky – Greying Wisps, v.5

I stand here
as if placed.

Not grown,
not arrived,
but set down
in the thin silence of the field
like a marker
or a warning.

Above me
the clouds drift
with the slow certainty of animals
that know the road home.

Grey.
White.
Grey again.
A soft corruption of the blue,
as though the day
has begun to bruise.

They do not hurry.
That is what unsettles me.

They pass over one another
in mute, woolly folds,
erasing themselves
as they go,
and I cannot tell
whether they are forming
or dissolving.

The world around me
loses its edges.

Birdcall, wind, the distant grind of life —
all of it thins,
all of it sinks
beneath a pressure
I cannot name.

Even my breathing
sounds borrowed.

The clouds keep moving
with that terrible ease
only the sky can wear,
and I feel, suddenly,
that I am being observed
by something vast
and patient
and nearly blind.

I am small.
Yes.
But not safely small.

A speck can still be marked.
A witness can still be kept.
A body can still stand
in the open
and feel the old stare
of the heavens
settle over its skin.

So I remain here,
rooted in the earth
like a nail in wood,
while the light goes cold
and the clouds keep writing
their unreadable message
across the face of the day.

And I do not know
whether I am looking up at them
or being carried,
quietly,
into them.