Tuesday Poem: Looking up

Heavens

Now there’s a galleon of pink,
sailing down a spilling
remnant of sunset,
burrowing into cloud belly,

sunrays burnishing
the underside of another
blue-white swell of
floating evaporation,

then the pink relaxes,
spreads out and eases
into the lavender roses of dusk,

pushing down against
the gathering gray,
all of it crowned by
upward strokes in an after-
splash of white, like hair,

while here and there
a sooty sloop tattoos it way
across the rest, moving east to west,

this mixing of air and water,
miles high, kneaded and rolled like
currents and tides by the wind,

an ever replenishing hornpipe,
a life giving fall and rise, heavy
and turbulent over our heads,

while we swim through
the fiction of bottom calm,
little fish, skulking in and out of
small caves in huge coral reefs.