The Cloud Corporation

by Timothy Donnelly

  collapses around us; another beautiful document

  disassembles into anguish (a cymbal-clap) and we can’t

  prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship

  trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks

  upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.

  And we will find protection only on the night ship.

  CHAPTER FOR BEING TRANSFORMED INTO A SPARROW

  1

  The world tries hard to bore me to death, but not hard enough.

  Today it made me sit immobile in the bath-

  water upwards of an hour, but the fact is, World—

  I was totally into it. There’s a canker anchored

  at the root of everything. Even I know that. Now what I want

  is to know it better, want to know deep down

  I can return to the world whatever filth I receive

  without compunction. I knew humility once

  and she died on the floor. What power do you think

  you have over me? Even fastened in your turning

  tepid and beyond, what I felt was strengthened,

  downright strong. The end comes once, I said, then what—

  What carries me now? A sudden heartwave

  moving rapidly, increasing with a pinch of recollected incense.

  Steady, spirit. We will address our Dead:

  —What are you now, a whisper? A vapor minnow

  in the rue-blue seize that never loosens, not even

  for a minute, not for a half-lived something

  like a dream? I trust the eloquent have already

  tried opening that grip with flattery and failed; possibly

  the only currency to grease a palm that monstrous

  has to be the same old prank of paper we have here—

  or don’t have, cheerfully (not quite cheerfully).

  See what can be bartered, what sacrifice’s smoke

  appeases over others’: there is nothing beneath me.

  2

  There is nothing beneath me: the days keep coming

  as if significant: events strain the heavenly, weak-

  seamed sack in which they’re pent; when one slips through,

  kaboom! that’s history, and I am nothing better

  than a shattered passenger, I pass by. Pictures develop

  more speedily than ever, in an hour if you ask.

  Remember the one of us on the ocean, salt-wincing

  on the two-tone flotation device? I can’t take it anymore,

  photography. How it flattens memory’s body down

  to a roll of surfaces—insistent surfaces; persuasive, yes,

  but not convincing, though they threaten everywhere

  to take the place of, usurping what they’d save, the way

  a javelin of lavender, sprung from the close of a once-

  loved book, asserts a dozen verities: first that of the plant

  from which it came, then of its having been removed

  (and that by human hand), then of a time, however measured

  (and that for waving through a field), next of the soil

  from which it grew, and by extension, of the world—

  inclusive of the book, and of the time, and even

  of the hand—but never how it felt, what anxiety or rapture

  conducted or conducts it, what faith in what ability

  of anything to capture, what brought it to begin with,

  what labor of the blood, what accident of lavender

  dismantled now on carpet, what measure of the spirit

  and of its having been removed, which is perhaps

  now waving through a field, and that from which it grew:

  keep waving through that field, keep waiting, please.

  3

  After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering

  the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing.

  Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance

  only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows

  thrown across my window. Often the mind would try

  to stay itself by imagining: a falling through the many

  numbered levels of the air, each level its progressively

  thinner shade of blue, as if the air nearest earth

  were the least of its forms, or had been ruined by what happens.

  And always as it fell the mind would snag upon a saving

  branch before colliding with the planet beneath it.

  No small debate surrounded the origin of that branch:

  had the mind itself devised it, or had you put it there?

  Its significance, however, was certain: something in the mind

  clearly warranted protecting, but what remained unclear.

  4

  In the shade of the need to know, to know that what was once

  remains, grows the knowledge that what was

  was almost certainly not that, not merely,

  not once. There is a way through all of this—

  a ladder, yes—but it’s a ladder made of thread.

  In the shade of the need, keep waiting, please.

  A day or two before they tore the pall of ivy

  down from the wall that held the hill in place,

  the invisible sparrows that had made of it a shelter

  seemed to sing a little differently, sing a little

  less, as if in apprehension, and what happened to them

  keeps happening to me. My green retreat

  has folded, drawn into itself without me

  in it, and had I known that it would, there

  would be less repeating now, or as much, but

  softer. At the barren wall, where what has been

  has been erased, the only phrase I stand

  with loving to remember, with temper I perpetuate:

  5

  who had pictured the world as one of degrees, from root

  to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath

  has learned to suffocate at last, and will not be found

  recumbent on the davenport, trawling the creases

  for sweetmeats past and the fruits of human reason.

  When I open the door to perceive you—you are there.

  Stay, illusion. There are so many things. Be with me

  on Harlem Meer, where you can be alligator

  grown past keeping. On with me to Gorman Park, where

  “stairs slant down into the dark / declivity of ivy

  wind and fallen / brown, late afternoon a weathered book”

  from which I will never leave, not breathing. Broken

  vessel, broken thought: late afternoon in Gorman Park, be with me

  that in what leaves will breathe in what is broken.

  You were the sparrow in the laundromat. I trapped you

  in the whelm of a pillowcase, showed you to the street

  with human decency, care. You looked me back into

  myself. And as then, so now—I commend you to the air.

  TO HIS OWN DEVICE

  That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes

  is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled

  up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s

  impecunious craftsman, making what he makes

  turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched

  in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk-

  white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze

  and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are

  wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree.

  What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest

  for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is

  you are meant to aspire to before you retire to

  that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we

  expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly ber />
  contained in these boxes. And again—no contest.

  And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off

  in the long-winded ploys of a winless October,

  unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . .

  —At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands,

  turned down a dock I remembered and wept.

  I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept.

  Looking out on the water in time we came to see

  being itself had made things fall apart this way.

  We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges

  and similar marine life, their resistance to changes

  across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art

  practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface.

  We admired the example the whole sea set, actually.

  Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges.

  We wondered that much longer before we had left.

  CHAPTER FOR BREATHING AIR AMONG THE WATERS

  Whereat the one clear thought

  I might ride on the remainder

  of my wakefulness was taken

  by the throat and carried under

  the surface leaving me

  not freed

  but caught up in what thinking

  tries to conceal:

  its foundation

  made of clouds, an anchorage

  in sinking down where to know

  is to feel knowledge dissolving

  into particles of pause, the many

  stoppages and starts that shape

  by sounding each possible maze

  through a landscape of otherwise

  perfectly nothing.

  I could lie here

  on the ocean’s floor, not human

  anymore, picked clean of it, long

  after the last petition for rescue

  tears through the darkening film

  overhead.

  After ages of strange

  susurrations plait into a dubious

  prophecy.

  After the ghost of me

  snags in the verbiage of rust-blue

  weeds and fades.

  But as the deep

  dislodges us in parcels, slow time

  reassembles: hands hard to clamp

  open, limbs barnacled; the tongue

  eeling ahead through whatever

  idiom it needs.

  If oceanic winter

  battens us on absences, shadows,

  on palpable blankness,

  as ancient

  waters heat, we take on velocity.

  And when, unsleeving, grown large

  in their confinement, the rebel

  tentacles drive us

  toward daylight,

  then we, oblivious, blinking, emerge.

  THE LAST DREAM OF LIGHT RELEASED FROM SEAPORTS

  And such proceedings shall be considered criminal:

  amusement amendments, two or more individuals,

  any dream proceedings which engage in the activities

  indicating intention, love, or other things of value;

  a safe house, a biological boulevard, communications

  that demonstrate the actor plans to commit rips

  in new material, transfer funds, have everlasting vision.

  Wendy, a sadness shall take effect on the specified

  streets until the real is removed together with the findings.

  If removal is unlikely, they shall take the sentence,

  the beach facilities, and the foreseeable future into custody

  and charge all with a criminal offense not later than

  seven days after the commencement of such strap

  from physical officers, offenses to the hide, such striking

  dismantling electronic surveillance, wild highway!

  The broken may be released on a table of contents,

  except in the circuit where hands are provided,

  mandatory madness, or the enactment of documents

  along the northern border, where huddled personnel

  trap adequate undercurrent, make criminal history,

  and waive such intelligence as necessary for the purpose

  of transcending platforms with certain maritime girls

  during dangerous velvet, beyond wrecking trains,

  beyond staff plastic and the sudden injury to buildings

  provided for the placement, the procedures for taking

  the liberty of fingerprints, chrome updates of extracts,

  a lookout for persons seeking to confirm a cost-effective kiss

  fully integrated to soul points and a privacy database.

  Wendy, carry out provisions to limit the authority

  upon terms consistent with the feasibility of enhancing

  clandestine telephone matter, the length of service,

  and small activities protected by the united light of mirrors.

  Headquarters are in the field the first night it appears

  in such mist as issued under the jurisdiction of harbors.

  Acts dangerous to human life occur primarily within.

  Any person who conceals in good faith has legs to believe

  in domestic possession, a likely subject, the written scream

  that produces new agency, a consistent sweat paragraph.

  Center the lonely secretary in accordance with such guidelines

  as defined by the dream engines, or by striking the engines

  and inserting machines, a firearm, the town weapon,

  or other device found on wanted tramps of prominence

  who pose known threat to the amended bones of heroes

  and higher education. This development is amended

  each place it appears. Each place it is amended, it appears

  again, appointing frauds of rearview, affecting deputy

  and primary duties, committing unauthorized camera sadness,

  counterintelligence, false access to disclosure mansions,

  sprung local liquid, acts of text assault, and distinct verbal gas.

  Wendy, stand in the wake of events, stand resolutely

  vibrant in the worship of the possible, the fullest human hands.

  New obstacles shall be established by the chairman of failure.

  Authorized language drones shall implement and expand

  written combat, chance procedures, and the day period, while the night

  force shall determine public and personal want and want-

  removal with a program of general sense regulations, preventing

  any means of notice, including but not limited to the light

  released from seaports, suicide, and the individual dream.

  BLED

  Thereafter it happened there would be no future

  arrangements made as the present had begun

  handing itself over to the past with such vehemence

  whatever happened already happened before

  or stopped its happening the moment it began.

  To look forward meant looking in where you stood

  astonished to be looking behind you instead

  into the distance where the water’s surface split

  and spread to a pane of undisturbed waters.

  Arguments among half-thoughts could continue

  then as now and did, scattering particles

  of gray on more gray, an expanse pinned down

  at the corners but taught by a sea-wind to shudder

  nonstop. To stand an oculus among that sea’s

  gray arrangements meant scattering half-

  thoughts to such astonishment that whatever

  began to happen split, spread, and handed itself

  over to a past where having happened meant more

  being stopped. To look with vehemence

  disturbed the water’s surface as arguments

  wind made of the future now shudder
ed

  distantly behind you. To look forward back into

  the expanse of such waters meant to want

  momentarily not to continue, seeing as to continue

  meant what it did, but thereafter already

  even to want that bled to no particular gray.

  DISPATCH FROM BEHIND THE MOUNTAIN

  Then there’s this: a page

  torn from the original

  stupor to which the mind

  is always driven to

  return, drawn by a calling

  back to the memory

  of what must have been a room

  you abandoned

  impulsively, caught up

  in the fluster of a vast

  misunderstanding, or else

  a room you never left

  without the sense you were leaving

  something of value

  puzzled in the billows

  pulsing underwater—

  and even as you turn

  to retrieve what’s lost

  you know you never will

  except in pieces, random

  glimpses of a nothing

  you want only to possess

  again entirely, entirely

  without sacrifice, as if

  to sift living long enough

  among dim lamps

  might press into your hands

  the sum of all the pages

  missing or else leave you

  briefly able to compose

  an apparatus which might

  force the infinite back into the cabin

  of your thought now and stop

  the animals where they drink

  along the perimeter

  of the lake beneath your sleep.

  NO DIARY

  minutes are hours in the noctuary of terror,—terror has no diary

  CHARLES MATURIN

  Through the chinks of the trap door / what we call life

  presents itself as a kind of task, namely that of acquiring

  amid all the horrors / more of itself, but as this task is

  undertaken, stepping out from its shadow, there appears