from Cloud Diaries
Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west. Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses. And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift. Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday sun.
*
The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key. The town wrote it was dividing time between here and there. No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company. Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.
-James Haug
James Haug’s most recent collections are Riverain (Oberlin College Press), Three Poems (Factory Hollow Press), and My Team Hates Friday (Press Brake). He publishes Scram Press in Northampton, Massachusetts, and drives a van for Riverside Industries.
James Haug’s immersive series of poems, “Cloud Diaries,” written in justified prose, is distinctly uncloudlike. It stands to reason that clouds who write must steady their words. The two diaries I showcase here appear at different points in the series, the first one before the second.
At some point I believed that clouds came from outer space. This is highly untrue. The internet tells us that “Even though a cloud weighs tons, it doesn't fall on you because the rising air responsible for its formation keeps the cloud floating.” As part of our biosphere, these bodies (that might be called water-vapor boulders) come from and return to the surface and water table of land. But while they are clouds they have a sweeping view of events: “Each hour looked like something else. And, looking up, no one agreed on what that was, that it was fast and beautiful, or just loitered there like a rain cloud that had lumbered in from the west.” How surprising, how lovely, that “lumbered in,” vaguely reminding us of cloud elephants we may have known. If “each hour” looks like “something else,” and the same scene can be described as both “fast and beautiful” (a quasi-oxymoron) and ponderous, there’s no continuity. Only a constant vanishing, exact and ravishing: “Such a quandary, with its hairlike threads of ice, dissolved soon enough in the midday.”
Those viewing the clouds from underneath display diaristic impulses: “Some thought of a memoir, a history, a memoir of history—life below the nimbuses.”
Surely a memoir is distinct from a history—genres have their own houses, their own rules. But do they, if they live “below the nimbuses”? What a wonderful title that would make for someone craven enough to steal from a cloud.
And the clouds, looking down, kept diaries too. Yet the entries bore little relation to one another—; and were they even entries, but extracts instead, so that the whole context was out of context, seriously adrift.
The above has captured the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is, after all, water in spirit form. The clouds’ own memories aren’t immune to the dissolution they enact and describe. Do the words from their diaries cohere, are they really “entries”? Or merely “extracts”—squeezed-out essences? It is often said that without cultural consensus, we inhabit what George W. S. Trow has called "the context of no-context."
It occurs to me that this early “diary” might be the poet’s introduction—in which case, obviously, its author is what Mayakovsky called himself: “a cloud in trousers.” Be that as it may, this particular cloud has captured the zeitgeist, the spirt of the times. It is, after all, water as spirit, spirit as water.
*
Our second cloud embodies a town with the kind of playful audacity we expect from, say, Kenneth Koch, whose interest in personification may have stemmed from Shelly’s apostrophes to natural forces and who often, in the spirit of a magically continuous childhood, presents objects as though they were alive, as in “One train may hide another.” There’s a difference, though. In Koch, objects do things. In Haug, they not only do, but commit their doings to writing. Perhaps there’s a bigger affinity with Frank O’Hara, whose sun (on loan from Mayakovsky) communicates via speech in “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.”
But only here have I seen such agency exhibited by an abstract collective. It seems awkward if not downright impossible. But Haug, obviously an expert at this kind of thing, simply muscles through. As one must, without listening to fussy inner objections about things not being able to turn themselves inside out:
The town limped around town. It favored life in the old stores, and now the old stores were gone. After a while, the town began visiting other towns, running errands, little day trips, a long weekend, a ferry before sunup. It left a toothbrush and a shaving kit and a change of clothes in a bag behind the door and acquired a spare key.
“The town wrote it was dividing its time between here and there” is a lovely parody of a mildly pretentious expression. Haug is a true literalist of the imagination. In other words, once the town has acquired human agency, there’s no limit to where or how it may live—a fact that astonishes onlookers—us and everyone.
The onlookers’ reaction--“No one knew how it was that it made money, but it spent big-time on the road. It was spotted dolled-up cavorting in mixed company”—exhibits enjoyment of insinuation (“no one knew how it was”), exaggeration (“but it spent big-time”), and sexual innuendo (“cavorting in mixed company”)—in other words, it has the panache of real gossip: no hard facts allowed.
The poem applies the familiar jargon of popular fiction to a situation that is anything but normal. Because denatured by context, these locutions zing with bright strangeness, like the unpromising photos in a Sebald novel. We might call this “cloud realism.” The town’s final departure from itself employs the classic trope of going out for cigarettes: “Early one morning, a miraculous bounce to its step, the town lit out for a pack of cigarettes—: last seen upstate somewhere, mapping the interior of a cloud, specifically lenticularis, a disc-like formation often mistaken for a flying saucer.”
What I’m calling realism, I think, actually resides not so much in familiar speech or situation as in vibrant detail: the toothbrush left “behind the door,” the “miraculous bounce,” and the stunning territory the town lights out for: the uncharted interior of a peculiar cloud, one shaped like a lens but “mistaken” for an alien spacecraft. The tone the poem leaves us with is scientific, rational, empirical—but this only throws its spectacular absurdity into higher relief. Our brief but sublime view of the phenomena that are James Haug’s clouds fittingly ends with an apparition of interplanetary travel—the cloud from outer space. -Angela Ball
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