Alice Oswald
LOOKING DOWN
Clouds: I can watch their films in puddles
passionate and slow without obligations of shape or stillness
I can stand with wilted neck and look
directly into the drowned corpse of a cloud
it is cold-blooded down there
precisely outlined as if under a spell
and it narrows to a weighted point which
throws back darkness
oh yes there is a trembling rod that hangs my head above puddles
and the clouds like trapped smoke wander under me
and the sun lies discarded on the tarmac
like an old
white
shoe
don't go on about those other clouds
those high pre-historic space-ferns
that steam the windows of the wind
I know I could look up and see them
curled like fossils in the troposphere
but I am here
I have been leaning here a long time hunched
under the bone lintel of my stare
with the whole sky
dropped and rippling through my eye
and now a crow on a glass lens
slides through the earth