Tree and Cloud

It would have been easier to follow Johnson
from pub to pub with a notebook and pen
or sift though cardboard boxes 
crammed with Trollopiana
than to tell the story of this anonymous mass.

It is hard to say even where it was born,
though considering its thick, whipped texture
and its lofty, processional manner,
I have it somewhere over a warm body of water,
fathered by heat, mothered by humidity.

We do know this much:
that it billowed white at the mountainous top
and its flat underside was the grey of headstones;
that it slid onto the land and felt its way
over the contours of several western states,
always moving eastward, from left to right
the way the eyes move over print
as if it were reading the earth with its blind shadow.

from The Biography of a Cloud, by Billy Collins

As for the tree, it has appeared in this journal before, back in March.