Door to a Cloud
Why not walk inside? Look for that white wool you can bounce on, flop on your back and watch cloud creatures as you did when you were ten. Or find a storm, whirl in its wind, crack off a piece of lightning for a necklace of spikes. Will a gray cloudfish float by? Can you touch its feathery scales?
Door to a Pond
There it is, just a few feet under the surface, floating in place. The water-weeds wave around it. Are there jagged rocks beneath it on the bottom? Or stone steps that lead you down to that startling place where you suddenly can’t stand? Is it an entrance to an underwater room with a fireplace of boulders, a hearth where you can sit? Watch watery flames?
Door to a Wave
Can you catch it? Jump just right through the wall of water? Don’t be scared; it will let you in. Then the view: the silver crested waves so high the sun is extinguished. It would take your whole life to climb them. So you turn around, push open the door, scrabble to shore before the next wave can pull you under.
Door to a Raindrop
Too small to enter. Leave it to the hummingbirds. No, to the gnats that harass your cat, his ears twitching. An opalescent world inside, but so short-lived. It will join the pond, the wave, the cloud.
Judith Serin is a literature professor at California College of the Arts, and her collection of poetry, “Hiding in the World”, was published by Diane di Prima’s Eidolon Editions. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, journals, and anthologies including Columbia Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Broad Street, Writer’s Forum, and most recently her memoir prose poems were published in the anthologies Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge (Grayson Books), and Impact (Telling Our Stories Press).