—for Judy Collins

 

She was not a cloud,
but when she sipped the river,
sky slipped out, sky and ripple and
the other side of cumulus, puddling her song
with thick. She was not the river,
but when she lay down
in the wet of cool,
she breathed mottled blue
and a mountain as mellow and green
as the underside of moss.
Mounds of shadows
rose and fell with her voice.
When she feathered the angel hair
of stratus, when she braided the shallows
with distant cirrus, we believed
her fairy tales floated
then dissolved just below
the shiny surface of illusion
where she sang both sides of clouds
that washed up in ballads
and the overgrown
banks of lovely,
lonely rivers.