Bright Cloud

(after Samuel Palmer: 'The Valley With a Bright Cloud' 1825)

“There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True.
This place is called Beulah.”
                                                William Blake, Milton

Is it supposed to be Good (or God) in everything
                         like silver linings,
         and all the better without any people?
I can't see it myself. Non in Arcadia ego, I think:
                  not much in the blackened trunk
of that felled tree,
                               stranded like a dead whale,

                nor in the murky stream
         winding forth and back into the distance
between trees and buildings so grim
   
that this might as well be a slow route to doomsday
            as the distant hill-top bastide,               
and not in the maggoty silhouettes
            on the horizon (horse, waggon, cow) …

On second or third thoughts, however —
           at least that many, to give Mr Palmer
his due -- perhaps, yes, in the pair of thrushes centre-stage,
          spotted with tunefulness and
                   billing like doves,
                                             and more likely, if at all,

in the voluminous bubbling up of
           cumulus over the valley, like extra helpings
                     from some irrepressible confectioner,
to countervail a world too much cross-hatched in
                    cuttlefish brown and lamp black —

           a substantial exuberance, as if a spectator
                    of that dismal slice of Kent had said aloud
“For heaven's sake, lighten up!” or “Mehr Licht!” or

“Beulah, peel me a cloud off
          that May horizon!” and
                    Beulah, transcendentally, obliged
with a great whoosh! of creaminess

        as if inspiration were as easy to come by as such
            cauliflowering brightness.