Lyrics

I keep returning to John Constable's Study of Clouds.             Oil on cardboard, six by seven and a half inches, it shows purple-gray             thunderheads, one patch of blue, above low hills and two small trees flanked by shrubs             in the left foreground. A sketch en plein air, a half hour's worth of work at most,             it catches exactly one scrap of sky and shifting sunlight on a blustery             day in 1820. The year King George the Third died in Windsor Castle, blind             and insane, the year 50,000 Scottish weavers went on strike and printed a proclamation             calling for a new "provisional government." Their leaders were caught, hanged, and then             decapitated for good measure. This cloud study survived that history.             Two minutes later, the clouds would have taken on a different cast of light and shape             just like the thunderheads now piling up above the Liffey. I hobble out of the Dublin City Gallery,             take a bus to the river, sit on a park bench with a ziplock bag of ice on my swollen knee. Its wet cold             makes the joint ache. My body is breaking down, bone spur under the right kneecap.             At fifty-eight, I watch young men and women in black sweats run along the River Liffey —             Abha na Life, Anna Liffey, river that crosses the plains of Life. I envy them.             Once I too could run over the asphalt, almost without knowing I inhabited a body             whose knees might seize up and swell. I will not run again in this life. Cirrus and cumulonimbus             scud across the blue escutcheon of sky. Sun's blazon through rain rampant, my life is a cloud study             for some larger landscape John Constable never got around to painting. It hangs in a gilded frame.             People stare at it before passing on to more important canvases, to Renoir's             Les Parapluies, women and men opening shiny black umbrellas in a Paris park.             There a mother shelters her two daughters under an umbrella meant for one.             The younger daughter holds a wooden hoop she has been rolling along tamped dirt paths,             whipping it with a stick to keep it spinning, before the rain settled in. Renoir painted             this small family in his lush, impressionistic style. Five years later, after visiting             Italy and studying Piero della Francesca's frescoes, he came back and finished the painting             in his new "manière aigre" or harsh style. He handled the gray silk folds of the auburn-haired woman's dress             on the left as if they were granite to be sculpted. She carries a market basket filled             to the brim with shadow. To approach old age, one needs a new, harsher style. Here, by the Liffey,             mothers push screaming infants in strollers. Five teenagers in blue jeans and bright yellow or green raincoats             walk by, joking, texting on cell phones, smoking. One girl and her boy hang back, embrace, French-kiss             a long ten seconds. Another boy shouts over his shoulder, "Get a room!" A pair             of mute swans preens and swims down the River Liffey, whose amber waters mirror             how the clouds pass, avalanche of cumulus that hangs forever on the burnished             unrippling surface of my memory — vast sky surf, cloud after cloud cresting, breaking             to be washed away to blue nothing. Each of us — lovers, mothers, runners, me — no more             than windblown swansdown.