The Biography of a Cloud
         
         It would have been easier to follow Johnson
         from pub to pub with a notebook and pen
         or sift through cardboard boxes
         crammed with Trollopiana         
         than to tell the story of this anonymous mass.
         
         It is hard to say even where it was born,
         though considering its thick, whipped texture
         and its lofty, processional manner,
         I have it somewhere over a large warm body of water,
         fathered by heat, mothered by humidity.
         
         We do know this much:         
         that it billowed white at the mountainous top
         and its flat underside was the gray of headstones;
         that it slid onto the land and felt its way
         over the contours of several western states,
         always moving eastward, from left to right
         the way the eyes move over print         
         as if it were reading the earth with its blind shadow.
         
         Otherwise, it did nothing         
         but allow itself to be blown through the high cold atmosphere,
         though it was always changing shape,
         and assumed in its lifetime the form         
         of Australia, the head of an enormous dog,
         a sheep on the run, a hippo with its mouth agape,
         and even the camel that passed through the eye of Hamlet.
         
         As usual, its existence was noted by only a few:         
         a workman eating lunch on a girder,         
         a woman on a terrace watering plants,
         and a large number of people named Riley,         
         all supine in hammocks or on blankets spread for picnics.
         
         Ordinarily it traveled in a convoy
         or pedaled along with one or two companions,
         but early one morning over Arizona         
         it held the distinction of being the only one in the sky.
         
         In the end, it died as all clouds do,
         in an obscurity befitting one of the minor English poets,
         the son of a London hatter or an Essex clergyman,
         sent down from Oxford for heresy or gambling,
         soon addicted to laudanum, then the slide into destitution,
         for their stories, too, begin to sound alike.
         
         But I would rather track the life of a cloud
         than labor over packets of letters
         written in a crabbed hand         
         or explicate the four sorry volumes of verse
         he would have left when he died,
         gout-ridden on a cot in Wembley.         

         I prefer a wayside bench, ensnared by vines,         
         to the dark aisles of a library,         
         a place to watch them inch across the sky,         
         caravans plying their ancient rrade routes.         
         I want to train my scholar's eye         
         on the bright shifting edges         
         where the weightless tongues of clouds lick the air.         
         I want to remove my hat, close my eyes,         
         and feel the sun, warm and intermittent, on my face.



 By Billy Collins
         From the book "The Art of Drowning"
         University of Pittsburgh Press
         
         Copyright ©1995
         All rights reserved.
         Reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
         
                 
         The Art of Drowning
         by Billy Collins
         Price:    $12.95 paper
        ISBN#: 0-8229-5567-9 paper.