Across vast spaces,
white billows rear to chilly heights,
wings blown back like classical statues.
Silently, they climb the afternoon.
Dwarfing the houses and shopping centers,
they drag dense shadows and never look down,
completely uninterested in people or cows
or their small doings.

A roiling cauldron--
black on black, intentions boil.
A jaundice fevers the air, agitating the ions.
Thunder rends the seams of sky
and lightning leaps down its broken stair.
The wind yields to tantrum,
a murdering dervish dropping hailstones big as golf balls,
reducing houses to piles of sticks.

And now the day has given up
its heat and confusions.
The hills sit blackly and quietly,
the air is fresh as line-dried laundry.
These clouds have no memory,
igniting the sky in vermillion streaks
like the blood-bright heart of the gladiolus,
like smoldering coals raked into flame.