—for Dominic "The Dominator" Todd
Once upon a time,
there was a small white smudge
that hung low in a vast blue sky,
hovered way down at the very bottom
where earth meets air.
The smudge was a cloud,
a cloud named Smudge.
Smudge was so low in the wide blue sky,
in fact, that he lay in a grassy field
near an old-growth forest.
If you were there, you would have heard
Smudge make sad, quiet sounds. He was sad
because he was all alone and lonely.
All his family and friends—his mother and father,
brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins,
classmates and neighbors—had moved off
somewhere beyond the horizon,
grazing on a southerly wind.
They did not mean to abandon Smudge,
but they were so content, their bellies full
and getting fuller on a wind so delicious,
so moist and sweet. So they left Smudge that morning
as he lay sleeping in a sunken field,
hidden by a thin blanket of fog.
If you were there, you would have seen
how the night-fog hid Smudge,
how fast to the earth
Ground Fog pinned the little cloud.
At first light, as the fog slid away
to hide from day, it snickered to leave
Smudge all ground-bound and alone.
The one who woke Smudge was Screech Owl.
As she perched on Red Oak,
Screech Owl sang a small, mean song:
This will be the day that you cry.
This will be the day to go bye-bye.
So cry, cry, Little Smudgling, cry.
Yes, cry, cry, Cry-Baby, cry,
Until you go bye-bye, Baby.
Bye-bye, bye-bye, byeeeee.
Screech Owl taunted Smudge
because she was afraid of the fallen cloud.
She was afraid he might smother her babies,
the way Ground Fog always whispered threats
to choke her three fat fuzzy owlets
nesting in the branches of Red Oak.
This is what Red Oak understood.
Red Oak watched the whole scene,
and Red Oak understood
but did not like such cheap behavior.
Hush now bird, said Red Oak.
Hush and fly by night; stay away from day.
(Red Oak had gone to grammar school
and loved to use the semicolon
even when he spoke, an unheard
bond of chance and possibility.)
Because Red Oak protected her owlets,
Screech Owl did as she was told,
and even to this day she mostly obeys,
which is why we rarely see her in broad daylight.
Red Oak shushed Screech Owl into her nest,
where she tended her owlets (who were quite safe,
as you would, but she did not know).
Red Oak reached down a friendly branch to Smudge,
who lay at the tall oak’s roots
crying tiny rain, weeping teensy droplets
that fell on fallen leaves and squirrel-forgotten acorns.
Red Oak extended a kind branch and said:
Now, now, Little Cloudling. What’s the matter?
I’m all alone and lonely, said Smudge.
Everyone left me behind!
You’re not alone, Misty Seedling, said Red Oak.
You’re with me, with a whole forest of me and my family,
and we can help you find your people.
Yes, we can! chorused the forest.
This made Smudge feel a little better,
but he was still frightened.
He looked up, up, up the thick, tall trunk of Red Oak,
all the way up to Red Oak’s broad-reaching branches.
Such a tall creature, thought Smudge.
Such a thick and solid leaf-topped tower.
Come fly up to my eyes, said Red Oak.
Come on, Fluffy Wonderling. Come float up here
and look me eye-to-eye.
Smudge puffed once, then twice, then hopped
three times up and down, but could not leave the ground.
He puffed once, then twice, then climbed
three feet up the oak trunk, but fell back to the ground.
Here was it, as Red Oak understood.
Here was the real problem.
Smudge had forgotten how to fly,
for he had fallen under the spell of Ground Fog.
Red Oak knew all about Ground Fog,
for his roots went numb every cold night
Ground Fog crept out across the field
and slipped in amongst the tree trunks.
Red Oak liked the fog, for it brought dew
and all manner of small news to the forest,
but he also knew about fog lullabies.
This is how Red Oak told the story to Smudge:
Way back when the world began,
when the very first trees reached,
inch-by-inch and night-by-night,
up through earth’s first mists,
many saplings grew
distracted by fog-lullabies,
bewitched and bemused
by small secrets they had
no right to hear. The little whispers
kept the treelings from full height;
stunted and runted, they languished
as bushes and shrubs.
If you were there as Red Oak told the story,
you would have seen Smudge begin to float up, up, up
the long trunk until, finally, he hovered
face-to-face with the ancient tree.
Red Oak said:
This is no place for high-soaring clouds,
way down here near earth and trees.
You must fly way higher than an oak can grow,
little Smudge; you must chase the wind,
drink it to grow bigger and stronger.
These words made Smudge feel proud of being a cloud,
made him feel just a bit bigger and stronger,
but his elation wilted almost as soon as it bloomed.
I’m still all alone, said Smudge.
Everyone left me behind!
The forest had never heard such a deep-full-smiling laugh
as when Red Oak rumble-tumbled his reply:
Oh, Smudge, how you do not know yourself!
You are a prince of winds, a son of air and water,
You live in vast and invisible rooms,
wind-fed balconies billowing curtains of thought,
breathing songs and all the secrets of earth!
Really? said Smudge. Where is my home?
Why, it’s up there, said Red Oak, pointing his longest branch
up to the mid-morning moon in the wide sky.
Your house is the space above all earth-bound creatures.
You drink wind and dream distant horizons.
As if language could make language tremble,
words brushing words to make some kind of meaning
beyond meaning, Smudge understood.
He understood.
If you were there, you would have seen Smudge
inhale the moist, earth-bound air
deep and deep and deeper still.
You would have seen
Smudge expand and darken,
assuming a shade of shadow-blue
neither you nor Red Oak had ever seen in a cloud.
You would have seen Smudge
soar into the open-armed sky,
smiling down at Red Oak,
whose highest branches waved
to and fro and to and fro.
As Smudge ascended on a swift wind,
he drank deeper and deeper,
growing larger and larger—
bigger than a boulder, heftier than a hill,
more monumental than a mountain.
Now he was a lofty summit
jutting into immensities of space.
Suddenly, something miraculous,
something remarkable occurred—
Smudge began to multiply,
first becoming two Smudges,
then four, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two,
and more and more and more and more,
mountain beyond mountain, ranging from horizon to horizon,
a colossal metropolis of cumulus clouds.
Smudge and his new family drank and drank and drank
invisible rivers of wind, oh voluminous rapture!
They smiled down on the forest.
Red Oak could see this, and so could you
if you were sitting in his highest branches.
Red Oak and you could see
all the sublime family of Smudge,
innumerable anvil-clouds crowning the thin blue sky.
And it began to rain, a heavy, happy, fulsome rain.
And in the dark soil at Red Oak’s roots,
an acorn cracked; a tiny oakling sprouted,
a child of chance and possibility,
small and silent but insistent as a semicolon.
