The Shapes Sadness Can Take

A boy on his back staring past smokestacks
wants the one white cloud to look like the state

where his father was born, then the town
that swallowed his mother following the divorce,

but the cloud wants only to resemble what passed
through it once. Not a jet which is a knife

tricked out with speed. But a flock of pigeons,
one body and many, a floating room filled

with air and algorithms and crooked weather,
a forgiveness of wings, like God thinking.

Copyright © 2005 Lance Larsen All rights reserved
from Quarterly West
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission