Cloud Study II

 No cloud is salvageable, though all of them appear whole.
Singly, and together, clouds make an afternoon—in the woods, just outside the woods,

Where people go for lunch—a painting. Planes pass over, over sheep-flocks
And sets of bare feet, in silence, in their own lowly time

Slowly diminishing. The white buildings on the high green hills
Shimmer away, then dissolve. The strawberries get eaten, the leaves

Plucked out and scattered at the feet
Of a few couples, bare-armed, bare-chested, attempting to stay awake

But not wanting to. It is a dream, or like a dream, a time
When motionlessness and cattle-light kept us in the valley.

Brian Johnson is the author of Self-Portrait, a chapbook; Torch Lake and Other Poems, a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award, and Site Visits, a collaborative work with the German painter Burghard Müller-Dannhausen. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, DMQ Review, Court Green, and many other journals. He is the recipient of two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowships and an Academy of American Poets Prize and has also served as the former editor of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. He has taught at Providence College and Yale University, and currently teaches composition, creative writing, and modern literature at Southern Connecticut State University, where he has also served as President of the Faculty Senate.

Published July 15 2023