There Are a Good Amount of Clouds in the Sky Kevin Dunn

Many thanks to Phillip Laudino & Kelly Corinda Kraemer for the unnatural amount of support and constant reassurance. These poems would most likely not exist in this form if not for you. Several lines in the following poems were inspired by certain individuals. These people are, in (I think) order: Beth Jacksier, Katie Queenan, Ali Rospond, Brian Zimmerman, Devon Moore, Nathan Butterfield, Abby Carroll Butterfield, and Phillip Laudino. Thank you all for saying and doing things that were poetry long before I wrote them down.

THE TIN CASCADE

In the very back of the English pleasure garden, there was a waterfall made entirely out of tin. The people liked to come out to the gardens and look at sunflowers the gardeners had arranged first on blue graph paper and then in real life along the stone walkway leading up to the tin cascade like pixilated impressionism. The people were in awe of how these talented gardeners could create something so effortlessly natural. The people were happy.

NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES A CHURCH BELL RINGS

You'll never be truly happy. You'll always expect it to ring once more and then again and again but it never will. The music will never be resolved. Nothing will ever come next just vibrations air quiet space around the bell around the world. The flowerpot still looks like a clay cup of dirt. The yellow sundress goes on until the end of all stars. Is it really only one o'clock? It rings again. No it must be two. Three.

FUGUE

I never saw her during the daytime, so I thought that maybe she was a vampire or that maybe I was. The music didn't help – Bach playing the soundtrack he wrote for a silent film on an organ in the chapel where my parents were married, the notes emanating from his phantom's mask a hundred miles outward. And we were, both of us, a separate melodic line of the counterpoint production, the composer's brain split in two or else played with somebody else's hands, making us up as they went along, all the bass figured until the final point of resolution. Everything was covered in blood and there were half a million stars in the pockets of my jacket.

THE WAY IT PLAYED OUT

I was watching the scene again through the blue filter of a silent film night. The violins were swelling in a big minor chord crescendo, so I knew something good was about to happen. Oh, never mind the music, a title card flashed on the screen in what appeared to be my own handwriting, we aren't supposed to hear it anyway. It's for the benefit of the people. Your mouth was moving frantically although no sound ever came out, just the way I remembered. I nodded my head in agreement as I allowed you to tie my hands behind my back and push me off the roof of our building. It was only ever there for their enjoyment. The music began to slow down as it changed to a nicer sounding key. I think I remember a flute beginning to play. Maybe even a clarinet or two.

THE MAN WHO

There is a man who sits in the corner and watches the same old movie on his little TV all day. This is all he knows, all he has ever done. The townspeople mostly call him The Man Who Sits in the Corner and Watches the Same Old Movie on His Little TV All Day, but some of the children have started calling him The Man Who for short. Some of the people dislike him because he doesn't do anything, and some of the people feel bad for him. The Man Who doesn't pay them any mind though. In fact, he doesn't even know they exist. The Man Who just sits in the corner and watches the same old movie on his little TV all day in his own little world, always knowing exactly how it will end.

SCARECROW

In the light of the snow, footprints disappear into shadows. Against the moon, a legless man mourns his ruined harvest.

FAMILIAR FACES

Off the coast there are two islands and the two islands are connected by a bridge. The people have a fairly easy time getting back and forth between the two islands, but every time somebody crosses the bridge, a small piece of it falls a hundred feet down into the ocean. Eventually there will be nothing left of it. There will likely be several casualties before the people of the two islands realize they can no longer get across. They will begin to forget about each other. On the horizon there is a third island. Nobody has any idea who lives there, but sometimes the people of the other two islands see some vaguely familiar faces floating by below them.

THAT TIME ALL MY TEETH FELL OUT IN YOUR CAR

We were driving along in your car and my teeth started falling out right in the middle of our conversation. I did what I could to keep you from noticing I covered my mouth with my hand to laugh when you said something funny and some I swallowed hard and sharp. None of them bled like I thought they would and as I snuck one from my mouth every now and again dropping my arm out of the passenger side window to casually let it fall away along the highway I was thankful for that. I wondered for a moment if anyone would ever find them lining the long road and what they would think if they did but then another came loose unexpectedly. As I was choking you asked me a question. I have no idea how old my parents are.

EYELASHES

I realized that it was probably selfish of me to think of myself on their wedding day, but also that that was probably the kind of person I was.

ENTIRE PEOPLE

It was raining entire people, and it had been raining entire people all morning. For hours, entire people fell from clouds made of the vapor of entire people. Puddles of entire people started to form on the ground, some so deep an entire person could have been completely submerged with no problem. Entire people started to drown in the puddles of entire people. The reservoir started to fill up with entire people. Entire people were going to be used to rinse the dishes, wash the car, clean entire people. When it had been raining entire people for a few days in a row, it had become impossible to see the ground at all because it was flooded with entire people. When it finally stopped raining entire people, there were so many people we could no longer tell if we were even entire people or not.

AFTER THE FLOOD

The real people stopped wearing shirts to help differentiate themselves from the fake people, but soon after, the fake people followed suit and once again it was impossible to distinguish one group of people from the other. So the real people naturally stopped wearing pants. But the fake people anticipated this and had already taken off not only their pants, but their socks and underwear too. Never to be outdone, the real people similarly stripped down until both groups of people were completely nude. The fake people were appalled that the real people would try to look like them, but soon everybody started to forget which group they were even a part of. No longer knowing if they were real or fake, some of the people started dressing themselves again and new groups were formed based on what the people were wearing. People wearing only shirts associated with other people wearing only shirts. People wearing only pants associated with other people wearing only pants. The groups became smaller and more specific than they ever were before. At last, you could see who everybody really was, who everybody wanted to be, less than naked, or more than.

THE BIRTH OF PISTACHIO PETE

Our old friend Pete really loved pistachios. We'd all call him Pistachio Pete.

A REAL PERSON IN A RUBBER MASK

My eye gave birth to a real person in a rubber mask. Raising the child wasn't as difficult as you might have imagined for my eye, but it often stayed awake at night crying because it would never be able to see its child's face. My eye had no idea what its child looked like even though the child was an entirely real person. The mask that the child was born in looked like a real child's face, but my eye couldn't possibly tell whose face it was. When the child was a teenager, its relationship with my eye became difficult. My eye started to suspect that the child was getting somebody else to wear the mask since it would never know anyway. Sometimes the mask would look differently to my eye, but my eye wasn't sure. It stopped looking at the child altogether and started to hate the child and started to hate itself for getting pregnant in the first place. The child was fully grown by the time my eye died. At the funeral, the child took off its mask. Beneath the mask was a mirror and if my eye were alive to finally see its child at the funeral, it would have seen its own face staring at it, glassy and backwards.

A ROUTINE OPERATION

The pain in my kidney had gotten so bad they decided the only thing left to do was to remove it completely. It was a messy job, blood all over the operating table. I didn't see any of that though, of course. So they stitched me back up, but when I came to, the pain was only worse so they put me back under and took out the other, and then my liver, appendix, both of my lungs, stomach, and everything else until there was nothing left inside of me but my heart. And so they took that out too, and the last thing I saw before it went dark was you staring at me from just outside the operating room with your surgical mask still on your face and my blood on your hands.

FOR THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES OR UNTIL CRUST IS GOLDEN BROWN

I couldn’t see anything with your tears in my eyes. You were dying and all you could think about was what you wanted on your Tombstone. Peppers, onions, some predetermined combination of words designed to do what? To keep you alive, you said, even though you knew you weren’t saying much of anything. It feels like something to be alive, and so you wanted something to reflect that – the mirror of your face constantly gesturing towards itself. Entire ecosystems fell from your eyes, every future generation you’ll never know, whole

civilizations, a self-made mythology insisting to everybody that it exists. A candle made of wood will burn just as well, probably even better, though in a way you

wouldn’t have wanted. After weeks of coming up with nothing you decided to quit and then you looked up and told

me: There are a good amount of clouds in the sky.

EULOGY FOR PISTACHIO PETE

Our friend Pistachio Pete was old. He really loved pistachios.

CLOTHESLINE

In the backyard of the abandoned house, a boy extends his red woolen arms towards the little bit of dirty snow still on the ground.

THE SIZE OF SUNFLOWERS

I was getting rid of stars planting them out in the backyard watering them with melted snow teeth along the highway bursting into sunflowers that looked like people their faces broken covered. I usually liked the quite peacefulness of cemeteries but that night was different. Somebody else's sunflowers were lighting another plot a hundred yards down and I could read clearly another heartless man's name. And then they were everywhere sunflowers for miles forever all the world a sunflower. I took my mask off and buried myself in the snow. I'll just leave these here I said to Pete. Keep an eye on them for me.

ONE MORE FOR WHAT THEY SOMETIMES CALL POSTERITY

It was my birthday and everybody got me different kinds of socks. It was nice of them to get me anything at all they didn't have to do that but now that I have so many different kinds of socks I feel pressured to make sure I wear ones that actually match. I told you I would pray for your survival but I probably won't it's nothing personal.