An Ode to the Sky
Oh great canvas, how the hours paint you.
Sometimes I wake to your optimistic rays,
though sometimes it’s on darker days.
The bright ones I lay and watch you roll on through.
I see shapes in your cotton coverings
that sail upon you like newspaper schooners.
And as the day moves forward, your landscape is lunar.
I connect the dots in your freckled smothering.
You are looking down on me at all times,
but I do not find you pretentious. It is just,
where you have been since before I was
and you are too great for me to fathom.
Those incandescent freckles seem like thumb-tacs,
piercing you and holding you all the way up there.
You are the world’s blanket and I’m beginning to feel warm here.
We are a snow globe under your incasing of marvelous glass.
So far above me, but seem so close through telescope eyes.
Some say you hold the gate to heaven. I don’t
believe in such things, but if I did, I would not
deny you were the place, with the sun and moons on your lapels.
