Cloud Study

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.