Red Sky Daydream

The clouds in my mind had misery

to thank for thickness and were very heavy

as well. Because I was unwanted, I thought,

because why else was I missing

and presumed not, when I was right there?

No sooner did the rain fall, then my mouth opened

and I called out

“help me!” I called openly into the rain

directly into the mouth of my mouth, which meant

“I’m too little to control the works of this thing—

help me out, wouldja?”

So my big mouth smiled from out of the blue clouds,

from out of the clouds that hid rocket ships.

The pirates stuck their spyglasses out the windows of the ship

and noticed me howling, “wah!” just like a big baby.

“Oh my lord in heaven’s bedroom,” said the old sailor

with a stick strapped to his broken leg for structure

and stability in the face of uncertainty and possible

loss of rotten limb, “get her a safe passage up here!”

he hollered back to the young boys and girls

who had to do all the hard work.

“But why?” one asked, a girl of twelve with brown bangs.

“For to help us out with this gargantuan rocket,”

said he, and added to the yellow pirate next to him

“besides, she’s making an awful racket.”

So they bunched me up in a cargo net and hauled me

past the cold mist of the cloud’s blue lips

and patted my head and gave me some dried fish.

“Don’t cry there girl,” said the old pirate, Samuel

Lemuel Clanderswich, who was boss and dad of the ship

“for I can’t stand the sound of it.

Here, climb up on pa’s lap and let’s tell us a story of the

High Seas.” Then he waited, so I said

“Once upon a time, there was an old grouch, his name was Half-wit

Booboo Head, and he jumped off a rock into a pit of darkness—”

“That’s good, that’s a start,” Samuel interrupted, “okay so then,

after that, his mother renamed him Esther—”

“That’s a girl’s name.” “Is it? All right, Nedly then.”

“Whatever.”

I was so crabby every word pricked like sword grass

at first, but then I felt better, safe

and sleepy. The way the old man talked

was quiet and slow, like a sluggish meander

reflecting sun, with dragonflies and marshbirds.

And so the story went on and on, til twelve brothers

suddenly arrived on Star-deck Four, flying in from a forest,

in search of their long lost sister.

They all wanted sweaters, it was so cold and damp

but the ship’s store of yarn had been knitted already into a long blanket,

long enough for the whole crew to lie under while Pappy Lemuel

told the same long story, so long that he always finished

to the sound of snores, and not one sailor ever heard the ending but him

so every night he had to start all over again, except it was always

a different story, other than the parts that were

always the same. “Pappy, why don’t you just

take up where you left off?” “What do you mean? I told the whole

damn story last night, it isn’t my fault you wasn’t a-listenin’.” “Well

all right start at the part where the father goes to town to sell his

whiskey—” “No, I already heard that part—” “Never mind,” Pappy cut in,

“there’s no point in starting a story in the middle, it wrecks the mood,

the ambiance” (he said frenchly) “anyway these poor

fellows are going to freeze if they stay up here, let’s let them down

below with us.”

So Pappy kissed them special and proper, each one,

rubbing their stubbly heads with his old hands.

Why, his hands were so old and raggedy

they looked like they had been cut off an oak’s roots

and stuck at the end of his long brown arms,

which were stretched from hauling rope.

“Oh Pappy,” the twelve brothers said

“will you be our new dad?” “Why that’s no problem at all, fellows,”

old Pappy said, “I’ll raise you up good— it’s these clouds,

they make you better than you would be

if your feet clapped the ground.”

“You see,” old Pappy began, after everyone was tucked in,

“a long time ago, we had our mothers, but one day

a giant come crunching up the road to our sweet village—

oh, my, the flower beds were so neat and straight

just like a white picket fence Fourth of July picnic

and if anyone was unhappy we never heard a word of it

just went to the funeral and looked at our shined up shoes

then ate sponge cake dribbled with jello and jello

filled with cabbage and radishes, and sweet sugary slices of ham —

well, you know the routine. But then one day as I said

a giant come by and you could hear his big feet

from a long ways away. ‘Fee fie fo fum,’ said he in a normal tone

which to us just about blew our eardrums out, even though

he was still several miles away. ‘I smell the blood of a woman!’

Well, that’s when the shooken ground got up in our bones and joints

and the women looked down at their laps and started to calculate

how fast they could run and how far they could get afore the lion —

I mean giant — got along and saw them. And then the men

glanced over at the women’s laps — and so did the kids, the old folks,

the halfwits, the mad fools, and the cripples, and they all smelled it —

that sharp, metallic tang of iron, that sweet-sour recently hardworking

red red blood that had paved the way

for more for the rest of us, and the women knew

it was up to them to take care of it.

‘Now don’t worry,’ said the wisest one, ‘we’ll let

the giant have his fun, until he gets tired

and starts looking off into space, then we’ll club him upside his head

and call you all back home. But meanwhile, go jump in the rocket ship

out yonder behind the barn, take a lot of food with you,

everything you can think of, just throw it up

through the windows, then go drift inside

the biggest, shapliest cloud you can find.

One day you’ll hear us calling, it’ll sound like a wave

pouring over a city, like this,’ and she made a sound

with her lips and tongue,

‘shshshshshshshshshhssssssss.’

We all listened good

and marked it, even the bears and flies, and planned one day

we’d go home, though we knew

darn good and well we’d never

scarcely hear that sound again

among all the other sounds of the world

from up high over the clouds, but didn’t say it.

‘Don’t worry, now,’ said I to the silent men and children

as the rocket rose softly in the spring evening

in the mist off the fields, ‘we’ll just come back

ever so often and check.’

Meanwhile the women had kept the grannies with them

to embarrass the giant by staring at him, and all sat on rolls of hay

knitting or embroidering

or something ladylike, looking the picture of sainthood

from the blushing to the burnished, when the giant come up

with such a thirst

and hunger and excitement that when he saw them daintily sitting

in their sexy get-ups of female bodies upon the rustic, so-so, mild hay swirls

he was sort of salivatingly disappointed, expecting terror and weeping

and small children to tear to pieces, or at the very least

from off of their mothers’ breasts.

“Well, let not the giant be mysteriously lumpish if he can be rosy as well,”

said Pappy in the deep smooth sudden voice of a cloud

“his blush so great it lit the sky for miles around and we saw it from the ship.

A long discussion ensued, which lost us completely,

our heads were spun badly off course, and since that time

we look for rosy skies

to touch down and see if maybe it’s home.

But so far, no such luck.”

Then all the voices came back to a single note,

a wave rainbowed past,

the ship left the harbor for the open sea.