The personal touch

I have fifteen cloud stamps, it says on the back
cirrus means curl of hair, altocumulus
lenticularis look like UFOs, I have put hair,
an alien invasion, on the envelope bearing the letter
you’ll read under the sky of your living room,
crappy light fixture sky, falling plaster sky,
have snugged in the envelope fifteen pictures
of my hand holding fifteen stamps beneath the skies
from which they were born, the one inch by one inch
cumulus humilis beneath the ohmygod by ohmygod
cumulus humilis, say that again, it suggests
humility and accumulation, these are the wide
and flat clouds that disappear by sunset,
what if we called them soul clouds, what if we claimed
to be descended from the sky, I can’t stop
saying sky, how about every third word is sky,
how’s it sky there, my sky? and I’ll write
more often now that I can send you buoyancy,
these playgrounds for airplanes, I feel better
just looking at them, taller, capable of swirls
and Latin, altocumulus castellanus, altostratus
translucidus, here are the possible incarnations
of floating gathered on a little sheet
except nimbostratus, “a dark, featureless cloud
marked by falling rain or snow,” why exclude a portrait
of your dominant mood, it would have been nice
to send a picture of how you feel beside a picture
of how I wish you could feel, cirrostratus fibratus,
a transparent cloud which gives the sun a halo,
you might stick a dozen halos on your forehead,
seven hundred on the mirror, anyway I miss you
my little undulatus, sweety opacus, let’s pretend
Heaven exists in the guise of postage, and though
these are the kind of stamps you don’t have to lick,
I do.

Copyright © 2005 Bob Hicok All rights reserved
from The National Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission