You always had a way with clouds,
as if they’d started life with you, coddled
in your arms, reared out of bonfire
smoke or hay-steam from baked fields.
Landscape painters looked to you to catch
the best effects, clouds like leopards,
lions, the great processions of a Byzantine
October. Now there’s little call for craft.
Or colour – years since you bore flowers
and drifted suns of pollen on the earth.
Tip up your grizzled chins and sky-watch.
Suck on your many pipes and offer me
bassoon pronouncements
on the drought, a fray of cirrus,
freakishness of hail, last hurricane.
Your old scars map a century of weather,
the haul of water, how you leaned
aslant the wind. You stand a long time
dying, but before you die, old tree,
let’s drink another rain.