Under gathering, cotton-puff clouds,
Ramping up like vapor mountains to swallow the horizon,
Sprawls a city of slate gray and black,
Amid the varicolored geometry of the cultivated land,
To taint it with its metallic, green-dotted ugliness—vanishing as the viewer is jolted.
The city on the highway crossroads fades behind,
as the plane dips wing northward through the turbulence.
The pilot takes the plane above the mounting clouds.
The passengers buckle.
Now the clouds float below,
Over a land increasingly ugly
Under man’s hungry hand.
Mountain-sized clouds float on a sea of deep blue
Over the Ohio valley,
Lost below,
The Mississippi missed and unseen.
Behind, Vapors reach for the steel wings,
Rocking the puny monster along its way,
Soaring over a sheet of white.
Stretching like snow-packed ice in the low distance,
Billowy vapor peaks jut from the pure white field
Like the mountains of some winter dream.
-from above high, cumulous clouds, elevation unknown
He: Gilgamesh: Into the Face of Time
