Four
Purple cloud, what am I seeing? Purple cloud, are you taking stock, or what are you bringing?
Purple cloud, were you lacking in enthusiasm because the world got too familiar,
That you faltered before finishing the job?
Purple cloud, how much are you sweeping under how big a carpet?
Is the territory wrapped up in the map? How much is altered?
‘The Purple Cloud’ is the title of a novel, written in 1901, by an evil man about a weak man,
Whose poisoner wife sends him on an expedition to the North Pole, where somehow, perhaps spiritually, he
Holes the crust and releases a hallucinatory gas that poisons everyone. Yet
The weak individual carries on as if something remained, visiting for days on end
The corpses of his friends and those of the writers he admires. Then he begins to travel,
Like the gas, commandeering steam trains, building with machines giant ziggurats at each stopping place,
As if nothing were wrong, as if he could simply go on and on as before. The purple heather is a similar thing,
It has no compassion for the mass killings here and the floods and reactor failure there.
It colours regardless; the soil erodes away, sixty years of the tops remain and yet it goes on flowering, undismayed,
As if all were well. Heartless heather, as relentless as an economy, its besom stems ready to assemble and
Sweep away everything. A purple haze obscuring a flag of ground, making a soup of thoughts,
Complacent in its dominance, schooled in hardiness, grounded on acid and hard knocks,
Waiting for its moment, modest emperor, to team up with the jellyfish, in a purple charm,
Taxing a stock of grievances; all the dyeing in the wool and grinding and regurgitation,
The Ancient Egyptian-like progress of purple souls through the four stomach chambers of the great god Baa.
Sentimental jewelry of the hillside, not being able to see is all part of being. Down there,
Among its mesh of fungal threads, commercial wounding goes on, the exchange of sugars for minerals and water,
As if everything were normal. It’s putting on its waxy coat, as if for just another day.
Nothing can threaten the purple cloud, while all the rest is washed away.