by Jeff Fearnside

When I was young, I wanted to climb

to the high places—

feeling life large in me,

in command of the views,

for the bodily satisfaction

of having climbed.

I’m now satisfied

to lie on the grass

and watch the clouds.

The distance from me to them

is exactly the same

as the distance from them to me.

Yet how insignificant I must seem

to them, and how astonishingly

grand they are to me.

Forms appear, morph:

now a loon, now a bat, now a flying monkey

from The Wizard of Oz.

A potato. A dog. A snail.

The Horsehead Nebula.

A ladies high-heeled boot.

They constantly move, change,

sometimes light, sometimes dark,

sometimes stretching their filaments

until they break

and disappear.

Yet even unseen

they’re still there,

dispersed, waiting

for the right conditions

to regroup and materialize.

A cloud is nothing

if not patient.

More forms appear.

Their shadows intermittently

engulf me.

Then they stitch themselves together

like cheesecloth over the sun,

straining its rays,

creating a single shadow

that engulfs everything.

To truly know

the immensity of things

one must be unafraid

to be small.

Jeff Fearnside is the author of two full-length books and two chapbooks of prose and poetry, most recently Ships in the Desert (SFWP,2022). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Story, The Pinch, Los Angeles Review, and The Sun.