Of Clouds and Concrete

For Steven, the tallest person I know. I guess the pebbles were right and we were wrong.

I knew the name of every pebble that made up the I-95.
They told me their stories of the tires they met.
I listened to their sorrows, like prison wails. Prison walls.
If my fingernails didn’t bend so easily,
I’d have picked them from the mortar 
Filled my pockets with friends.
Heavy, walked the earth.
Heard the laughter of them rubbing together with my steps.
Instead, I stretched on my back and let them sing to me.
Their voices held the beauty of the oppressed.
Of clubbed baby seals.
Of circus tigers made of paper.
We all prayed for rain.
 
You breathed the clouds I once loved so dear.
That spring, when I was smeared across the highway,
I looked up at the sky and saw you inhale
out of your corncob pipe. Exhale a cirrus.
A cumulonimbus. The shapes of teddy bears and trains.
My friends and I spoke of them in whispers
in case you could hear us.
One pebble said they were overrated
and had no business being so big in the sky
for everyone to see.
I laughed, and said they were so big
because the man who made them was not capable
of being small.
My pebbles asked if I loved the man who breathed clouds.
I did.
They said I didn’t know him.
I didn’t.
They asked if I loved him even when he made thunderstorms.
 
I could never be with the rainmaker, they told me.
I was so close here to the ground
he lived in the stratosphere.
How could a being so small as me,
so small as them, ever be loved
by a creature with legs the length of freight trains?
I sat patiently with my friends who could not move.
I told them the story of a wombat
who fell in love with a fruit bat.
Of flight and footfall.
Of clouds and concrete.