Vanishing Act
A poem by Gill McEvoy

Vanishing Act

My cloud is saddled and ready to go.
It was sent me by a friend when I was ill:

from my bed I watched the clouds
and when I saw one shaped like a horse

I recognised it instantly
as she had said I would.

I coaxed it down by offering oats and peppermints,
kept it well-fed, well-cared for and well-loved.

Out of spite the other clouds ganged up
to form an unrelenting black depression.

They kept that up for weeks but finally today
they have surrendered and departed.

I mount my cloud; how light it is to handle,
how obedient,

rising steadily like a lift ascending –
first floor, seventh, twentieth, thirty-first –

soon we’ll burst through the roof and out
into a blue we’ll vanish in so completely

that no-one looking up from down below
will ever be able to pick us out.

About the Author:

Gill McEvoy is a Hawthornden Fellow (2012). Her third pamphlet “The First Telling”, (Happenstance Press 2014), won the 2015 Michael Marks Award. Two previous pamphlets from Happenstance Press. Two collections from Cinnamon Press: “The Plucking Shed”, 2010 and “Rise”, 2013. Recent collection “Are You Listening?” (Hedgehog Press 2020) and a Selected Poems due in late 2023, also from Hedgehog Press. Gill is a keen amateur botanist and lives in Devon, UK, where she leads wild-flower walks round her area.

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