White clouds make white trees past the green trees. Cloud forests drift across the sky, or they are white leaves from the giant upside-down tree we see too close to understand.
They seem to be moving, but it's us, on the earth's surface, who make the cheapest and most natural journey. There's no need to go to a viewing platform to see the landscape, because the landscape is above the street, between the top floors, in the panorama of the sky, with butterflies and white birds perched with their wings spread, and masses of Arctic ice floating by, which we see from above, or perhaps from below, and then the space between us and the clouds is filled with water, lead-soled divers looking up. And perhaps we don't see ice sheets above us, but whale bellies.
Where could the universal be, if not in the clouds visible to everyone, distributed indiscriminately, hanging from a mobile in the sky? They are the geography of the ceiling, the Alps and the Pyrenees up there, always snow-capped. A mobile mountain range of clouds gradually rises between two peaks. The mountains swell or melt, and flocks of hills graze on the slopes of a smoking volcano's crater. If we were to turn the world upside down, the mountains would be the clouds, or fields of daisies walking on water. We don't know if the mountains are still or if the clouds of the sky are there.
Sometimes the clouds drift below, dragging a silky lizard. Other times, the weight of a black belly drags them down. Although they sometimes anchor, there's no stopping the inertia of the ship's navigation above us, its holds filled with the drugs they transport and deliver. They're intoxicating, and we gaze at them with our eyes rolled back, their whites.
They decide the filters, and where they'll let in the patches of light that will ignite the fields amidst the darkness they themselves create. But how fast must they go to move all that mass? Do they have the wind engine?
These same paragraphs are perhaps the shadow of clouds passing across the sky, if there are any. They seem still, but their days are numbered, if you read this printed on paper; minutes or seconds, if you read it on a screen. It doesn't matter; what matters is knowing that when we're gone, that random and evanescent watch will continue.
