cloudbusting *

 

by José Luis Gutiérrez

 

 

 

 

this morning the world is pregnant

with its vanishing.

fog ghosting the trees in the yard

as far as the eye can rove,

waves of an alien invasion

in the form of mist—

chiral distillations

of weather & the day’s modest

quotient toward hope:

                                                            with what ease the mind slips

                                                            into science fiction.

                                                            an absence of birds.

                                                            exuberance of green in the heights,

                                                            towering dance & sway

                                                            of leaves, bending in tentative

                                                            configurations of wind & weight.

i stand,

ballasted by clouds,

& praise

this song of air, yearning

                                    into moisture,

                                    more than any other shared

                                    singularity of space.

                                    reminds me how breathing

                                    we drink in this strange world,

            molecule by molecule:

indulge the brain’s

cumulus aspirations

to drift & dream.

 

 

 

 

* a cloudbuster is a device invented by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with the purpose of draining clouds of “orgone energy.”  Reich believed that such energy surrounded the earth and that a cloudbuster would act as a rain-maker.  Reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster calling the research “Cosmic Orgone Engineering.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco poet.  Host of the BookShop West Portal Poetry Series, his work has appeared online at Spillway Review and in print in San Francisco Poets 11 2008 anthology, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts Issue 3, Margie Review Volume 8 2009, San Francisco Poets 11 2010 and Letterbox Magazine (Issue 5: More to the Point).