Clouds

Following a blazing spring, summer began with downpours, and is only now brightening. But even on this sunny afternoon, the clouds are sky-wide, like sodden blotting paper.  Its rained pretty much constantly through June, the Calder Valley landscape is drenched in vivid green. I don't think I've ever seen so many leaves on the trees. 
These cumulous skies have put me in mind of cloud-themed poetry, of which I have written an abundance through the years.  Two of my unpublished collections contain homages to clouds, and my still-being-written pamphlet of purposely verbose poems Slitheroe Bridge includes a special sequence of short poems about them:

 Clouds, like bones of undiscovered animals
dotting desert sands or the silty silences
of caves, stud night's mirage
of starlit dark,
skeletons dredged
from a broken arc.

My poem Cloud depicts a spring sky, a bubble of clotted cream, spilt into a pool of splashed shiraz, in which one individual cloud, fat, throttle-coloured, brooding with an undertone of stone, menacingly hovers like an injured bird of prey. Yet, despite the heavy rains, the cirrusy blizzards and carpets of cumulonimbus plastering the skies this summer have been characterized by a certain softness. 

 Like pale pearls, they have floated by in understated elegance, or else their sunlit forms have glistened like dishevelled sand dunes, feathery deserts stretching endlessly through evening skies.

At times, it has been their resemblance to faces, like these two eye-sockets in the sky, that has drawn me:

or else I have marvelled at the clouds' interactions with the moon, fleecing it in rolls of rumply lint, like a space-age scarf.

For the most part, my cloud-capped cogitations have engendered short and slightly frivolous fealties to these rain-laden deities:

Like floating custard creams
they teem in reams
of sugary white,
or, bloated with intent,
darken morning skies
in rainy shades,
thick downy-brown,
like rich, milky coffee,
hovering hob-nobs,
silky Milky Ways,
spilling spinning grains
of warm, glucosey rain
to satiate the soil's sweet teeth.

or have focused wholly on clouds as portents of downpour:

Like a stratospheric soapsud,
you paint our summer sky
in greyey, clayey, 

concrete-curdled gloom, 

a concave ditch;

sky's stony skin,
domy doom-monger,
sombre sequin, stretched
above us like the face
of a disappointed parent.

But it has perhaps been of an evening that the fanciest clouds of this pluvial June have most enlivened their empyrean stage, like some cloudy carnival of sunset-swaddled clowns, easing into a sleepy swansong. And it is on this nocturnal note that I propose to conclude this cloudy contemplation:

Billowy pillows
where the sun rests her head
on the broad, blue-blanketed double bed
of sky, cushioned with star-embroidered dreams.