Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick. Her most recent book, Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel, is forthcoming from HVTN Press (2023). Butter Intervention (2022), is available from Veer 2, and Morsel May Sleep was published by Sublunary Editions in 2021. Other books and pamphlets include Heave (Smithereens Press, 2018), Sonnets to Malkmus (Sad Press, 2019), Achatina, achatina! (2019, SoundEye Press) and Excavate (Poems after Pasolini) (2020, Oystercatcher Press). She also edited the Free Poetry Irish Anthology (Free Poetry, 2017).
Colin Leemarshall runs Erotoplasty Editions (https://erotoplasty.tumblr.com/). He is currently working on a project titled Total Spiritual Refection. His translations of the Korean poet Lee Sumyeong have recently appeared in Rabbit and Lana Turner and are forthcoming in Chicago Review.
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Gentlest Clouds from A Whale Called Milieu
Suburban sheep with biblical names, Baal and some
such, cluster just under the motorway flyover. Groping,
in a non-creepy way, is a tactile yet tacit procedure for
finding out. Tatonner en français, which gave its name
to some sort of gesture of the market’s stabilising
invisible hand. A tiny, grey humpbacked cloud, bodying
into an expanse of blue framed by an extravaganza of
MGM backdrop clouds, becomes our Milieu, for a
moment. Trying to feel its way into the sea of soft white,
unwhaling itself as it goes until there is nothing of it left;
or everything, just not in a form we can pick out from
the mass. We could pick out sheep for counting, if we
stopped the car under the overpass, but not cloud. It’s all
the one to us. Swallows lift off, scattering shadow on the
grass as they go, but only once the phone has been put
down do they zoom into clear view. The stillness needed
to capture that motion just is not here, only a chain of
pictures of aftermath and residual cloud. That atlas, map
of something constantly in movement, reminds us that
lines are an invention of ours, cutting the earth in a
patchwork that can’t be seen from space, no more than
we could see a grid overlaying the face of the sky from
here. No borders, no owning, no zones in the ozone. A
map in constant motion, a raft woven of the molecules of
the substance it’s transporting.
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Ellen Dillon Colin Leemarshall
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