Poem of the Week: “John Constable, Study of Clouds, 1822,” by Ciaran Carson

Carson contemplates life’s transience via Constable’s painted cloudscape, which captures the ephemeral in fixed form. Each image becomes something else as soon as it forms: watery images condense into clouds, are rarefied into images of the human body on a screen, then return to “the sound / Of water in the Waterworks.” The result is evasive yet familiar, evoking the sense of a need to search for pictures in the clouds amid the changing weather of our lives.  

–Ciaran Carson, from Still Life (2020)