By Robin Turner

What falls away is always. And is near.
– Theodore Roethke

They have been over and around us, above
and below us, reflected on water, all weather

and wonder, steadfast and absent, a storm.
They have been name-that-shape as we gaze

from the grassy banks, chariot for saints
and for sinners, soft cotton batting, friend,

apparition. Today they are the stuff of my mother’s
late dreaming. They flood the snug room

where she sleeps. God calling, she tells me
from this side of slow waking. Heaven

trying her on for size. She pushes Heaven away
with her hands, swats at God as she would a pest buzzing.

We drink tea honey-sweet, steep ourselves deep in the Here
and the Now. Mother’s clouds Holy Ghost it to the next town over.

I watch them gather, reconfigure in the near distant sky.

Robin Turner has recent work in Bracken Magazine, Ethel, River Mouth Review, and in the Dream Geographies project. A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is now living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.