Cloud

Smaller than gnats, almost imperceptible, glistening flies
hovering in their edgeless clusters
shaping and reshaping sideways through winter sun’s white light -
mid-air thrips emanating between shadow and light-ray -
thirty centimetres above damp long grass, matted weeds, cool earth,
visible and invisible as they swarm and float,
dots and instants one moment, noiseless aircraft the next,
homing for a place at sunset where they can land,
bubbling molecules escaping yet returning as flashes on
the eyes when staring at brightness: all of them exploding into an event
because they’re seen or because, momentarily, they’re intersected
by a slanted glare-effect which now races from the sandhill world
back here to temporary green depth -- the flies coiling and startling
in soon-to-be-dusk air,
evidencing themselves as minuscules,
as splits, splinters, glints,
dots of grit between shadow and amber spandrel
tubed - no, framed - under branches of turpentines and applegums
and in that way, quite possibly meaningless, quite possibly
microbes of non-significance suddenly there in the bare world’s
sinking warmth:
                    microbes below significance as is any sense
of being that’s brought into prominence when the context
seems lost, non-existent, a flicker darkening
in which (no less instantly) you remember details too terrible to
bring to mind of, say, a car-crash or a house-fire
(even of a murder or of a child drowned in the dam),
details a person will never fully remember, never accepting nor forgetting,
for they’re details too tragic to narrate, too instant and cloudlike,
moment of shattering micro-second which your mind still scans:
thus, the 8 mins 19 secs which it takes this light-blip, this hillock
of incandescence, to arrive and settle measures a tranquillity
never to be borne - like the provocation of virtual particles dancing -
though it occurs every day in a glance, whether in grief, or even ecstasy.