by Catherine Rockwood

A floating cloud has forgotten its last rising.

Forgetfulness of all kinds is a great splitter of forms.

Everything is wavering between what it remembers and forgets.

Wind pursues the cloud; the cloud dissolves itself.

What does a cloud gain by remembering?

The towers of silence are the province of a careful word.

A clepsydra weeps in time, because of what it’s forgotten.

Dew is the lost memory of clouds. 

Who shall keep the keepers?  Anyone.

By remembering, a cloud gains in competence what it loses in deftness.

It endeavors to obtain perpetual motion so that it may remain uninstructed.

Everything is wavering between what it remembers and forgets.

Remembering, a cloud will weep in time.

Catherine Rockwood’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Reckoning Magazine, Scoundrel Time, SWWIM, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere.  You can find her nonfiction and reviews in JMWW, Mom Egg Review, and Strange Horizons.  Her poetry chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, is forthcoming from the Ethel Zine Press in 2022.