The Cloud-Bearing Tree
November 21st, 2007
He looked up and saw a cloud and seized a tuft of it and as it slowly drifted away and pulled his arm after it he made up his mind and hauled himself up, climbed inside and sat.
He poked out a hole to see from and watched other clouds mist by.
In some clouds he saw other eye-holes. Some were vacant — he wondered about those. Some held watchful eyes. Most revealed others hungry to get his attention — hands sticking out and waving, widened and smiling eyes, greetings called out in voices mostly eroded to murmurs by the high whisking wind. He did nothing in return, only sat and turned his head as the occupied clouds sailed on.
He slept for half a day.
When he awoke he forgot where he was and screamed until he remembered, then he looked around, ignored the eyehole, and went back to sleep.
When he next awoke it was dark. He looked out the eyehole and saw a valley lit up with electric lights. He tried to piss out the hole but most of it splashed back against him and he sat in the soft bed of his cloud-vessel, reeking and tired.
He dreamed he was in a submarine going deeper and deeper into some black, eerily-lit trench with the pressure threatening to pop his brain like a grape, and he wept like a baby as he felt his body crushed and kept saying over and over: “I didn’t think we were going this far, I didn’t think we were going this far” with his face pressed to a porthole and the cool glass slippery with his sweat.
He awoke with a start. The cloud was stuck. A tree branch skewered the far end of it like a fork tine. He looked out the eyehole. Other clouds, with other passengers, were similarly stuck on the dead tree’s branches like dried leaves on a porcupine, snakeskin on cactus. The tree looked newly canopied with its great heavy tufts, season-defying and mystical, like some part of a landscape on an ancient chinese tapestry.
Every season the man had the strong urge to climb down, as all fruit must drop and he imagined it must be no different with him and the other clusters of white tufted cloud. But he never did, he stayed there all his life, eating from the nuts that grew on the boughs and learning to tell the seasons and even the fine gradations within seasons by the bark of the branches that skewered his moored vessel.
The eyehole closed up after a week and he never again had a desire to look outside. He grew old and his beard tangled everywhere with the curds and peaks of cloud, merging in white whorls. He died cocooned, warm and shriveled like a seed in its shell, and happily so for he knew there was no soil for him, never had been, only always this, the promise of cotton palm cradling him frozen in sky and now serving as his coffin until lightning breaks his bones loose with a bolt.
