Cloud

Beaut flocks that tease out according to moods

Billowing beauties above old Gloucestershire

Spider lightning over Sumatra

Sunset Fiji pink, Kenyan quietudes.

It’s official, I have finally unfriended

The Cloud Appreciation Society Pages

Its surfeit of surface that daily engages

Worldwide cover: clouds-in-the-Cloud ended.

The screen is off, I’m out the door what’s more

To extend appreciation to my place

Piebald cumulus over Collingwood

Storm warnings entering my neighbourhood,

Noontide of fritter, wet ones full of grace,

Friday night Eaglemont’s glam-like forms.

Stewart Terrace in Macleod on Saturday morning

Cloud (January)

Humid January morning again, walking down somewhere past yellowed grass. Cloud though, great mounting ranges of them the colour of agapanthus but darker, a purple-grey. Before white satin rose of the east, clouds that might become rain filter showers of light. Citywards shift clouds like creamy paint slapped thinly over blue balsa and frittering embankments that will condense and convert into downpour, when? Zenith has mother-of-pearl for miles and armrest cloud, beloved of the seventeenth century. Every quarter-hour the arrangements change, now sheepish fluffy numbers, now flat strips of vapour. Clouds crumpled linen, clouds jigsaws, clouds dark as solar panels.   

Cloud (June)

Very dark grey clouds drift rain over houses, hidden the other side of black slopes. I suppose that’s Kew. Pale grey clouds rest awhile, to all appearances, between dark grey clouds and black horizons, their paleness soft with first light. Horizons’ trees are patterned their length, cold and black. Trees and clouds are giants that, to a seasoned eye, are small black lines and pale grey light, the season being June here in the south. Our eyes turn to the hills, while further away the palest blue imaginable appears between grey clouds below dark grey clouds beside the city cluster. 

Cloud (March)

[Sculpture] Atmospheric’s March show has some nice cream-and-grey slabs at 30-degrees, just out of reach. Cottonwool bags, reminiscent of pipe smoke, extend diminishing toward what must be North. Fans will be thrilled by the big Italian jobs banking to the apex: always worth a look. And the clamour of a hundred clean sheets, hung out in full public view, billow below their pale-blue self-made oculus. Atmospheric’s nod to installation pays dividends too, with nets of overcast that left this observer in a strange mood, neither happy nor yet sad. Employment of real water for rain clouds is original. Patrons beware!