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      July 27, 2017A Thousand Possible CloudsValentina Gnup

      Image: “No Name #2” by Ryan Schaufler. “A Thousand Possible Clouds” was written by Valentina Gnup for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2017, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      Go find a pencil
      the world is a terrible first draft.
       
      When you write a story, you have choices—
      horizon, chickweed, loneliness,
       
      a copse of trees harbors soldiers
      stealthily as a virus invades a body
       
      or holds redwoods, gentle as grandparents,
      collecting their centuries in a map of pale rings.
       
      Listen, a foghorn beyond the fields
      moans like an animal suffering
       
      the sky has surrendered its hours
      or exploded into a thousand possible clouds.
       
      The children on the road far behind you
      have lost their parents, their country—
       
      someone got too greedy
      someone believed he knew what was right.
       
      Or they’re your children on that road
      carrying home blackberries to make cobbler—
       
      cut the butter into the flour, stop to kiss
      the swirled crowns of their heads.

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      This amazing poem by Valentina Gnup seems to describe the mood of the painting by naming only what isn’t contained within it—all the things off-frame that we aren’t able to see. The best ekphrastic poems often operate tangentially, after a leap of separation from the visual content that creates the same effect as the cut that bridges disparate parts of a haiku: the poem is both completely a part of the painting and completely not. Gnup crafts this special kind of schism perfectly. I’m sure the children are there on the road, just off-frame, right next to the cow that sounds like a foghorn. What’s more, I read this on the 4th of July, and somehow, almost magically, all of Summer 2017 America is contained in the painting, too.”

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