landscape

I wondered lonely as a cloud
-William Wordsworth

clouds are the ghosts of old dead mountains 
& sometimes they tell each other stories
of wild animals they used to feel across 
their skin: bears & wildcats & 
all the different grey feather birds & yes
hawks we can't forget the hawks 
& i'm sitting outside & wondering
how hard i would have to pray to become a cloud
like all of them--i think to myself 
i'm a mountain i'm a mountain but i always 
get smaller. yes i remember this is due 
to erosion. i am the hunk of rock shrinking
in the rain & asking to please get taller
but never getting taller. all the mountains
i know are shrinking & in not so long
they will look like scars & not like mountains.
i wonder if the scars on my body turn into
clouds too. i look for my pain in the sky
among the bruised sunset. i look for the sunset
in the color of my body. the mountains are tired
& deserve to live so light up there--
deserve the opportunity to rain. as for me
i'm not really sure what i deserve. someone tells me
i deserve better. someone tells me i deserve
to be loved but i feel like these things
are not special or specific to my body.
maybe my body deserves the color orange 
or a hawks with it's white & brownish feathers.
maybe i deserve clouds talking to me
& telling me that it won't be long now
before all the tall things are air. 
i asked a cloud if skyscrapers count
as mountains & the clouds thinned out--
growing thinner & more depressed. i shouldn't
have asked. how do you know your landscape
is real & not just a painting? i don't know yet
but i did see an airplane & the airplane
drove right through the cloud & i want 
to knock on the window of the plane &
say hey do you know you just 
went right through the center of a mountain?
& the pilot would say that he did know--
that when he was young he would take a shovel
& try to dig through mountains & now
that he's older & has this machine he can.
i can fly sometimes. i can hurt myself in flight.
i can feel the droplets of water in my skin.
i am a pouch of marbles. i am a so much
a cloud especially if the cloud has hints
of acid rain. i am caustic. i am cancerous
but only to trees. i am looking for a mountain
to help ascend into the sky. 
i take handfuls of earth & tell the mountain
to get up off its back & go where 
it's cool & blue & uncluttered.