The Cloud Corporation

by Timothy Donnelly

  a few minutes later / another, more difficult task, namely

  that of distracting one’s thoughts from the burden of

  at every moment / that which one has striven to acquire.

  That some grave mistake, inoperable, nests in the cog-

  as I entered the church / work of that life proves abundantly

  clear: through a chambered air, a convergence of needs

  while I uttered these words / hard to satisfy, whose short-

  lived satisfaction achieves no more than a pause in the

  midnight / noise devolving in time into a boredom that is

  at once beachfront property and proof of the emptiness

  at last / of existence per se. If existence held intrinsic

  positive value, then there would be nothing left to refer to

  as I set the lamp down / as boredom: it would be enough

  merely to exist. But mischance cut the power without

  the clock struck two / which we are powerless: moonlight

  confuses us with its statuary: we find nothing adequate

  while I poured out my heart / to strive after or fear that

  doesn’t disappoint. Little wonder then we should cast

  into the garden / hours into distance, difficulties, gambits

  designed to perpetuate the illusion that our goal might

  with dropt and wordless lips / satisfy. Intellectual activity

  removes us briefly from the swelter of existence. This is

  the clock struck three / its interest. Any sensual pleasure

  fades on attaining its object. We know when we are not

  on the verge of extinction / lost in such pursuits, thoughts

  lilt back to the terms of this existence, its fundamental

  feeling my fear about to be / insignificance, leaving one

  furious with it, but protective nonetheless, as one might lay

  in a fever / one’s hands in tenderness upon the heaving

  animal one is given to destroy, even though I have come

  over and over / through long experiment to abhor being

  nothing terrifies me more than the prospect of it stopped.

  EPITAPH BY HIS OWN HAND

  From the morning he started

  peeling his first potato

  he felt like he’d been peeling

  potatoes for eternity—

  all that fell about his ankles

  like clouds’ inky shadows

  smudged across the pastures

  of an afterlife clearly

  put farther away from him

  the harder he worked for it.

  POEM BEGINNING WITH A SENTENCE FROM THE MONK

  Far from growing familiar with my prison

  I beheld it every moment with new horror.

  Thoughts to which a mind should not be driven

  drove me through a bank of devilment in flower.

  Thoughts to which the mind had grown immune

  soon sickened me against me, turned me

  in among me stranger than before, my quarantine a panic

  room bricked in, a tightening around me

  in increments only animals know. And now I inch

  the walls like ivy, probing the brickwork

  with patient cheek for cracks admitting outside air.

  And now I feel, or feel I hear, a livid spark

  through an old antenna on the tower’s top. And now

  I wish what others spoke were stilled inside

  the mind in stoppered, mouth-blown bottles,

  and I’d place these bottles in cabinets made

  to resemble faces, and what was said would stay

  where you’d expect to find it: in the cabinet

  pertaining to the face of the person who had said it.

  It may or may not be necessary to point out

  this isn’t the first I’ve been seized by the thought.

  I have in the past found pleasant distraction

  assembling a taskforce to distill speech data, another

  to oversee its placement in cabinets, a third

  to tend to the general upkeep, a last to awaken me

  with a mild ringing: I have the gong already.

  Storage of this nature should, but can’t, be infinite—

  one’s archive’s blueprints echo one’s anatomy.

  Something mere about the word brides my crazy.

  It may or may not be necessary to point out

  it could be said, to revise a statement made above,

  I feel a strange degree of familiar discomfort,

  as if the closeness of my skin went atmospheric, aglow

  with insignificant warmth, as when a flashlight

  lights the mouth, or burning hot, as when Pazuzu

  visits from the south, bearing storms and fever.

  What interests me is forever can’t tell a difference

  without dissolving it. If certain cheerfulness

  comes with the territory, apparently some sacrifice

  does too, but it’s a kind that goes unnoticed.

  Standing before the cabinet of your face, I unstop

  a bottle; I savor its phrase’s nuances. And although

  you are far from this undertaking, you are closing in

  in spirit. And although I have often felt buried alive

  like an architect in the tomb it was his dumb luck to design

  for a paranoid king, looking around here as if

  I were its visitor, really taking it in on its own terms

  and not just paying lip service to the big idea,

  doing the work of putting words to the way I feel

  in the thick of it, a little like building a birdhouse

  underwater, I see no reason why, given a modest

  number of revisions, I couldn’t grow to love it.

  HIS AGENDA

  All these empty pages must correspond to the days

  devoted to lying in the bygone style, the head

  buoyed for hours in a harbor of jade pillows, eyes

  turned to the window where the hours bled from blue

  to deeper blue then burned away—the whole day

  dazzled into night without innovation, the sky again

  the temple of the mind perceiving it, the clouds

  becoming thoughts like pilgrims chance had carried there.

  I think of them arriving in the bygone style, in light-

  colored robes and lamblike manner, their simple

  fluctuations visible through the linden branches

  that would not have been in leaf or flower at the time.

  I think of him attentive to the pilgrim voices, softest

  silver audible to inmost ear, and also of the pleasure

  that he must have taken there, a pleasure I admire

  somewhat more than I admit, and put the shut book down.

  THE RUMORED EXISTENCE OF OTHER PEOPLE

  I dreamt my household consisted largely of objects

  manufactured by people I would never meet or know

  and some of these objects dangled down from the ceiling

  while others towered dizzily upwards from the floor.

  If most of them stayed where I left them as if dozing

  in embryonic thought, still others came with features

  conducive to movement, making them appear more

  endearingly alive as they powered up and off in search

  of excitement, an hour’s diversion—no harm in that.

  Intuition stopped short of determining whether or not

  any of the objects kept in contact with their makers

  via some kind of bond, perhaps a physical connection

  explicable through science, or else a spiritual affinity

  notoriously difficult for an outside party to understand.

  But the more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me

  believable. A silver line, a souvenir, a sieve of relation

&n
bsp; meaning to release something lovingly means always

  remaining tied to it. As to be somewhere completely

  means never having to leave. I thought to figure out how

  many presences collected around me at that moment.

  Did they possess consciousness, would they cooperate.

  Should I expect a new kind or the mundane damages.

  Everywhere I might be now in light of where I’ve been.

  I dreamt I held out my hand and before long a banana

  flew up from the industrious parenthesis of Costa Rica

  and provided for that hand before it knew it wanted.

  Start slow, be consistent, and your levels will increase.

  I dreamt the will of manufacturers to produce goods

  was shed from those goods long after they were made.

  All the windows overlooking a landfill or production site.

  The more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me

  obvious. Also touching. Whoever built that warehouse

  across the way built it thinking someone would one day

  look at it in wonder. Also sorrow. To keep an endless

  store of that feeling. To make, to provide it. That I might

  turn my back on a building like that will have become

  unthinkable tomorrow, when my sympathy with most

  abandoned things is effectively cut from the budget.

  I dreamt in increments of three, five, and eventually ten.

  Not the way the objects at hand rubbed me but more

  the way those beyond me made me pang for them there.

  I might even say the walls, the floors, the plush carpets

  unrolled on the floors and the furniture, the refrigerator

  and any item in it, nautical tchotchkes and the curtains

  clamped tight as August quahogs to optimize my output.

  The shedding of the will, too, takes place incrementally

  across decades, late at night, the little shifting in a room’s

  air profile comparable to a ghost’s entrance if not quite

  equivalent. At work beyond the warehouse, everything

  else: droplets on navy felt, protection sensed in a system

  whose products had begun to forecast accurate wants.

  I dreamt a body’s indentation beside me on the mattress

  vanishing as the presence found the door through a film

  adaptation of silence. Child with gifts for ravens in pockets.

  Lady affianced to alien abduction. Figure of the human

  experiment almost over. I open my mouth and in no time

  lasagna, Chianti, a greater than expected rate of melting,

  atrophy, military action, and a ravenousness that shook

  my confidence and the hinged box I keep pin money in.

  The rumble of it recalls the convulsion Plato says the gods

  sank Atlantis with to chasten its inhabitants, whose vast

  majority descended from Poseidon and one of the island’s

  earth-born shepherdesses. As long as divinity remained

  predominant in their nature, Atlanteans kept obedient to

  the laws of their progenitor, but over time, what was divine

  diminished, and love of wisdom and virtue gave way to

  love of wealth and luxury, which in the past had seemed

  merely distractions. To those who lacked the ability to see

  through the radiance of things, theAtlanteans appeared

  to be thriving: palaces, baths, mines rich in orichalcum.

  Herds of elephants. Vineyards, orchards. Access to upwards

  of a dozen sherbets. The chance to astonish houseguests

  with golden oblongs and lozenges. To watch as vampires

  turned mortals into vampires for cash, despite the fact

  that vampires could easily devise a life without having to

  dirty their pale hands with money again, but apparently

  nothing restores that old vitality like a night of spending.

  I dreamt a percentage of my money had been touched

  by entrepreneurs of the undead. I dreamt I’d never guess

  how much. Dreamt no idea where my money had been.

  What bathroom floor or choir stall or Alp or what disgrace.

  Dreamt I couldn’t taste a difference. Dreamt my money

  might want company, and I had better not keep putting it

  in my mouth in that case. As drawing from a songbird’s

  coloratura, I dreamt the secret to prosperity is being

  commonesque. Profiteroles, remote control, the ruin of

  my body. And tremulous as horses hidden in old plaster.

  Confused as vinyl siding. Certain as what’s happening

  can’t have all at once, or even all that fast, but by degrees

  imperceptible until too late, eyes trained to other tasks

  as the sheep took to clover, distracted as a vortex of plastic

  debris measuring twice the size of Texas patched itself

  together mid-Pacific, a swirl like a god’s intoxicated eye

  but not surveillant, voyeuristic, a bright new continent

  only in it for the kicks, its culture to bask, its historiography

  accidental, with every bit of flotsam serving as a double

  record of one product’s manufacture and consumption.

  I dreamt in complex packaging that posed no less a threat

  at the factory warehouse than up among my cupboards

  or dropped in the superabundant trash bins at airports.

  Found it simple and good to forget that threat by letting

  perception of such objects eclipse true knowledge of them.

  Any worry washed in umbra. Like being in the moment

  only endlessly. I hear the naked hands of strangers make

  my dumplings but experience insists what makes them

  mine is money. I open the door and I extend good money

  into ancient night, night prosperous with stars, order heavy

  in my hand. I’m immortal that way. I lie down and I feed.

  3

  NO MISSION STATEMENT, NO STRATEGIC PLAN

  When loathing’s narwhal thrusts its little tusk

  deep into the not-for-profit of my thought

  and anchors in the planks across which I have

  stomped unfathomable hours, and thanklessly;

  when I feel the panic of it struggling to dislodge

  and all the damage done to the ship thereby—

  the prow, to be exact, if we agree this is a ship,

  and now I fear we have no choice—when lost

  in drear blue Baffin Bay, if night’s first voice

  says Quick, we’re sinking, yank that narwhal out,

  it must be night’s second, less impetuous voice

  saying Not so fast. Why not leave it where it is?

  THE NEW HISTRIONICISM

  When the actor on stage slams his fist against the table

  one last time, his other hand holding a worry-heavy brow,

  half-shadowing his eyes, we can almost taste the thumb

  of circumstance bearing down on him, and we know what now

  he has to become: a man of action, opponent to the forces

  that brought him to this crisis. We’ll watch as he chooses

  his moves with caution, demonstrating as never before

  what we have come to call free will, his plight felt so acutely

  we have no choice but to believe in it, even if we know

  that the path our hero manages to cut through the hedge

  maze of opposition was actually penned forth centuries ago

  in the looping longhand of an author now conveniently

  apart from the drama which seems to reveal the illusory

  nature of free will even as it attempts to excite our faith in it.

  All my life, I thought to myself, asking for the tre
mendous

  embarrassment it drew up in me and against which I fought

  whole- to half-heartedly, making of my mind a religious

  rite observed by no one but me and my understudy, static

  windowside as cloud shadows advance over ancient pastures

  monks tend sheep in. I send my latest bulletin their way

  by way of thought but it can’t be made out above the fuss

  gathering in the herb garden as, true to form, a massive ship

  flying head-to-wind, sails luffing, cuts through the chill air-

  waves raveling upward from the mouths of distant heather.

  I signal to the monks again, only this time via semaphore,

  as in ship to shore, but they’re still too distracted to notice.

  Meanwhile the hero places his hands palm-down on the table.

  He pushes his chair back, starts to rise. Then the house goes

  black, pitching us into the dark at this—the decisive moment.

  A struggle between the darkness and the sense I control it

  ends abruptly.The darkness is not nice.The ship steadily

  approaches the monastery as if sailing on the surface of the sea.

  When the lights come back up, the hero reappears, pacing

  across the ship’s deck’s planks in what we have come to call

  anxiety. I drop my typewriter out the window to show I know

  what is expected. That the hero and the others on board

  will notice monks pacing on the earth below them and drop

  anchor right then and there. It lands in the bed of lavender.

  Monks crowd around the anchor and seize it as if their own,

  though the rule states clearly that none shall receive a message

  or a gift without first informing the abbot, and that even if

  the abbot knows and orders the article to be accepted, it lies

  within his power to present it to whichever brother he chooses.

  Moreover the brother for whom an article was intended

  mustn’t grow angry, inward or upset should it find its way

  into another’s hands, as such behavior only serves to present

  the devil with an opportunity. As the air takes on the scent

  of crushed communal lavender, in the darkness comes a voice

  that says that it belongs to me. It comes to test one’s mettle.

  Meanwhile the hero, red with the monks’ untoward behavior,

  leaps overboard to reclaim the anchor, moving deliberately