Cloud Translation

What if I asked you to translate a cloud?

What if I handed you a stringed instrument,
a small clay cup, and a shard of blue glass
and said,

Here are your tools?

What if you were allowed to use words,
but had to choose between consonants
and vowels? Between syllables and howls?

What language would be best?
___________Music? Math? Mongolian?

What if I handed you one single useful fact:

A standard-sized cumulus cloud
______________weighs roughly a billion pounds.

Yet it only lives for a day or two, at most.
And where that cloud ends and other clouds begin
is open to discussion, and that conversation
is ongoing and unending and calling the cloud it
is a lesson in absurdity in line with linguistic
oddities such as the words silence, infinity, and nothing.

For the record, I weighed 197 pounds
on the Health-O-Meter column scale this morning.

Of that mass about 110 pounds was water,
is water, which means on most days,
13 gallons reside inside me, are me, and so I hold
the past lives of many, many clouds,
who are a kind of ancestor, cousin, and future.

Translation strategy: Maybe point
at a cloud and ask passersby how many people
that current mass of vapor has passed
through on its way to becoming?

Or maybe point at the slowly turning white
hair at cloud’s edge and say, Grandma!

Or the next time you’re on a turbulent flight,
you could listen to your stomach
when the plane sluices off a pressure ledge
and jolts the water of your guts
back up into your ribcage.

_______________It’s worth noting that
clouds are no less mutable than granite.
Granite is simply slower.
__________________You know how
the sun can leave an after-image scorched
into your retinas even through the glowing
crimson of your eyelids?
__________________Staring at clouds
for prolonged periods produces the inverse
effect:  it deepens and sharpens your vision.