Pretty Clouds

The evening sky over San Francisco made me do it!
  December 18, 2002

I wish we were driving down the highway somewhere in Iowa, or maybe Kansas: someplace flat and open, with broad vistas and no people.  It would be the end of the day, and an endless road would bisect the plains of undulating grass.  If we looked back, we would only see the same road as the one before us, pushing like a tired arm against a distant horizon, miles left behind identical to miles lying ahead so that if a traveler walking on the shoulder stopped and spun around with his eyes closed, he would lose all sense of direction.

We’d be driving right into the blooming sunset and I would pay more attention to the sky on fire than to the flow of asphalt.  You might be mad at me for that, or not, depending on who you were.  I would stop the car and get out, a grin forgotten on my face.  Looming overhead would be clouds that threaten to swallow the world, beautiful monstrosities of white, black and orange; magic ice cream scoops of every flavor from vanilla to peach to stawberry.

Air is the most elusive of the elements.  I tried many times to describe its swirling infinity but words are too small to hold something so immense, so quick and changeable.  Did you notice that the sky grows bigger from New York to California?  Traveling west across the continent is like moving backwards through a funnel: the walls of the world gradually dilate, its features assume gigantic proportions until you feel like an ant scaling the slopes of Olympus, and there is nothing left to do but stop, turn up your head, and yell, and fall back into the grass.

Would you fall in with me?  I’d lie on my back and you might straddle my stomach and laugh with me, freckles on your face, blades of grass in your hair, my hands on your hips.  We could look at each other with wonder; we could kiss; we could smell the grass, the earth, and ourselves—my breath mixing with yours.  I would see the reflection in your pupils, me looking at you looking at me looking at you, both of us locked in our own private infinity.  Then your face would get too close to mine to stay in focus, and the last thing I’d notice before dissolving in the warm waves would be the crescents of white where your irises rolled up underneath the fluttering eyelids.

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