Far-off Cloud

The far-off cloud is based on the far-off island, a theme that has run throughout my life, apparently.

I encountered it first in The Incredible Shrinking Man, a 1957 movie about a man shrinking so fast that when he weeps tears of grief over his plight the small teardrops become an ocean to the shrinking man. At the end of the ocean is a distant small island, the symbol of man’s constant yearning for infinite things, for things he can’t reach, for achievements beyond his talents, objects beyond measure.

When I watched the film again about a decade ago, there was no island. Possibly an earlier print of the film had included one? Or I had made it up? Maybe it’s my own personal metaphor of a world always beyond my reach: Olivier, with his nose pressed to the glass of the elegant restaurant.

I have written dozens of poems based on that concept. Clouds have the same effect on me: they are misty, nebulous palaces in the sky, only available to gods. They can never be reached. When you fly through them in a plane, they evaporate: they are mythical. They only exist from far away. Touch them and they vanish. They represent one perfect day when I was a teenager, lying on the grass in Dorset, surrounded by rolling grass hills, with the clouds scudding like cows across the light blue English sky, the necessary accoutrements of perfection.

From the window where I write I can see that far-off island. It seems far away, but it’s an illusion. The island is simply small, and maybe a few thousand feet out into the bay; but it looks like it’s huge, and mountainous, and twenty miles away. It’s craggy and primitive, like Skull Island in the Godzilla films. Waves break on it as high as its peaks. It sits on the reef which rings our bay, protecting us from sharks. We can also see a small flat island off of the public beach, and two large islands with their own beaches, called the Mokes. On a clear day, we can also see Maui and Molokai, and on very clear days, the Big Island.

The islands came with the house, which we bought during the pandemic. It is such a coincidence that I should be face to face all day long with the object of my lifelong yearning, that it seems more like a cosmic inevitability, a loop in the structure of the universe, an invisible working of some prophetic clockwork, that my eidolon should ultimately be sited just offshore, framed by palm trees, naupaka, and beach heliotrope.

I had gone to NYU film school in its initial year, although there was no film involved. I had wanted to be a film director. So my poems now and then acquire a cinematic vocabulary, and dream of becoming screenplays.

In this poem, the ocean panorama is a film being projected on a screen, as we project our memories inside our minds.

I dreamt the last stanza. In the dream, the only way to tell the difference between early, affected Meryl Streep and her later seamless performances was the font in the script. As an altar boy, I would support the priest at midnight mass; the priest would swing the thurible and waft incense to the congregation; he would also shake the aspergillum over the faithful in the pews, sprinkling them with holy water. This water was blessed and kept in the baptismal font at the entrance to our church.

So the ocean clouds are sprayed with sea spray and sea fog, blessed with mist. But a view really has no meaning, no screenplay; it’s all in the vastness of the scene, how large the typeface is, like the Meryl Streep dream. The poem builds to a climax, and then disintegrates, the way rain depletes a cloud.