Sarasota, Florida, USA
Cloud Viewing
The old masters went snow viewing
and inked poems by brazier light.
Letting go of arising & passing, they
shivered with the nature of mind.
Genial, life & death haunted hunters!
In Florida we go out cloud viewing,
eyes filled with wine-bodied, innerlit
here-and-gone Spanish armadas
of fleeting shape shifts. All summer
greedy & guilty & crazy with excess.
I give my eyes & heart. At sunset
take a camera to the quay beneath
the Sarasota bridge that arcs to
St. Armands Circle & capture high,
warm luminaries in watery sky drifts.
From nowhere a half-naked fisherman
drags over a hooked catfish. It’s
eye fiercely piercing clotted last light.
“Can’t eat ‘em,” he says & plunges in
his knife. Dark falls, chafes & ignites.
© John Wark 2009
