Sean Bentley of Eugene, Oregon, recently discovered the Cloud Appreciation Society after reading the book RAIN by Cynthia Barnet. He wrote this poem in 2023 after reading THE INVENTION OF CLOUDS by Michael Hamblyn, the biography of Luke Howard.
Image: by Ronna Friend of distant storm clouds developing near Eugene, Oregon
Nimbus
Twenty-twenty-three. Not enough Spring yet,
despite the calendar, although the proverb
holds, and so drenched in gray
we await May’s radiant flowers.
April showers fell here anyway, back before
anyone had a name for this bleak veil,
a taxonomy or rationale, around the time
the luminous Lewis and Clark slogged their way
cross-country to what would be Oregon
―naming the glorious things they’d found:
Large-Flowered Clammy Weed,
Lady’s Slipper, Beargrass, Elkhorn,
Pronghorn, Bighorn, Bobcat.
Lewis’s Woodpecker. Clark’s
Nutcracker nagging from the branch
of Western Redcedar dripping on his tent.
Clark bitched at Clatsop, Pacific camp, week
after week after week of downpour, gloom and cold.
The “drisly… repeeted rain” fell, he wrote,
simply from a “verry lively, black Cloud.”
Just a cloud.
Unaware that Cirrus, Cumulus, and Stratus
had emerged, unveiled to English societies
by Luke Howard, Amateur Meteorologist.
Not far, I am, from where Clark was.
Out the window rain runs and drips
from cultivated Bamboo and Fan Palm.
Not far, but two centuries and more
from where it poured and poured
from the same vast Nimbostratus
that halos my sky, which I now name
Shivergiver, Drizzledrop, Dimdamper.
© Sean Bentley
1: A luminous vapor, cloud, or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on earth;
a cloud or atmosphere (as of romance) about a person or thing.
2: A rain cloud.
– Merriam-Webster Dictionary
“ …we see the lower Clouds spread themselves, till they unite in all points and form
one uniform Sheet. The rain then commences….”
– Luke Howard, “Of the Nimbus,” Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, 1803
“From the 4th of November 1805 to the 25th of March 1806, there were not
more than twelve days in which it did not rain, and of these [only] six were clear.”
– Patrick Gass, Corps of Discovery 1806
