I knew a woman once who only painted clouds.

We’d have endless arguments about whether they were beautiful in reality, or only in conception — exquisite, swirling arguments thrown like shadows against the summer sky. You want this lie to be a still lake that reflects the calm of your own face, she would say, I don’t.

On bad days the impossibilities of twilight would become a topic. Garrulous waters would dry up. For someone who knew so much of winding blue threads, she suddenly would go as blank as a mirage.

Our long sighs hung in the sempiternal dusk. At the end you would look down at the carpet, where a cat’s whisker retained its aplomb, like a sideways pine needle, forsworn, useless as an overly detailed patch of reeds in the foreground



*


In the gradual, fabled annulment of life circumstances, she said, or rather decreed in swathes of imprimatura, every other sentence would hit the same (more or less) against the canvas of the wall, greytone, white on white, black on black, mudpie flung far across the room would be layered over, made steady by printing tape or practiced hand about the loom— uncompromising.

In my mind there were three kinds of fables. The Greek, impossible world fable, which began ‘there was and there was not’; the Native American fable, which tossed you into it the midst of things mid-world with ‘Coyote was going…’, and the distant world fable from Grimm which belched out the world as it began ‘once upon a time…’ We were most of the time plunged into the middle of things, awash sometimes in an ocean of words.

The clouds gathering, gardening, reverse impasto ink-spillt and spilling out onto the flanges of the new moon most of all perplexed her, what they meant because you could not touch them, could not therefore represent them through ordinary ways of seeing—there is eyesight, insight, but you must learn moonsight, she said, and that does not mean learning to see things by moonlight; seeing things as they are is no learning at all.

Did this mean: seeing things as they are requires not knowing what they are? Or was it that the visual appearance of things in moonlight, as much as daylight, still obscured some hidden essence? Was it an essence the relief of clouds would reveal? In my own form of moonsight I recounted to her the time I dreamt I walked the shoreline of some small island with Chimako Tada, who as she held her palm in mine, having already crossed over, lost to uterine cancer, in feeling my grip spoke the tanka

the color of the sand along the shore before it pantomimes the shoreline is the color of your hand

The shorelines pantomiming the shape of a hand curved as to frame the moon spoken across generations as across selves. The pulse of the woman as the woman who loved clouds gripped my hand when we first met at a gallery, hers. There was in them the excitement of reading a story together, a real narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, a fable or fairytale, not a disjointed series of thoughts such as this.

*


The many emotions you feel are reflected in the clouds you see overhead, I tell my students on days the days thunder like gods, relentlessly—yet to try, try and pursue one ideal (this was our common ground), that is the way—it doesn’t help, thinking about it—She painted those hazards too: indentations, folds, linens piled up, feather of moonbeam and albatross, wrinkled father or dew and page, inscriptions in cuneiform translating trades of wheat sheaf and reverie, corn husk and slightest shadow of acorn thrust under sun

to which clouds overhead could compare only as whispers to nature’s dimmed objectivities, so she’d paint and draw and tolerate in her lap the heads overgrown of strawberries minded of fields


*



There is nothing that it is—
I became used to the sudden exclamations, and would agree.


Most things end that way, faint stains of cat vomit on carpet shag from years together, artist qua artist inspired or not reached a point at which the paint on canvas had blended together so that it was in the end unsalvageable.


Those completed weren’t really even a certain color, being so airy and diffuse, like wildfire wafting smoke, or like the violet incinerations of rainbows towing blocks of sky, ligaments of romanticized Daedaluses sculpted off-white. Yet nor were they opaque, nor translucent as the perfection of elemental air against which you imagine they exist, you exist.

I have to go then, I have to go; I have to drift out across the meadows, and become as pure as air spread thinly across stems of pale sunflowers southward the sun, like Michelangelo I must study the corpse-veins in the sky, she would have said, whosoever it was I have been thinking of, who doesn’t exist—



I lay down.
I became as sister to the reed.
I became as brother to the flute.

Clouds their offerings continued to play a silent music.