The Bayou State has the most beautiful clouds.

You know – those big, puffy clouds that look like cotton candy floating around the cosmos.They look so yummy, you feel as though you could just reach up, grab one, and take a big bite of it.

We had to memorize the cloud types in sixth grade, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what those puffy clouds are called.  I could google their names and impress you with my brain power.

But why should I? I mean, the name of a thing is not the thing at all, is it?

The name is just a representation of the thing.It is only an approximation of the thing itself.

And puffy clouds are not an approximation of the thing that is named.

They are the thing.

How could anyone – poets, lovers, and madmen, alike – imagine so perfect a thing?

Especially when that thing is surrounded by a blue so blue that even that name is a misnomer, for it is so much more than blue. Can you see the moon playing Hide-and-Seek in all that blue?

I sometimes wonder what the use of a name is at all. Who could name a thing and have the name express all of what that thing really is?No one, I suppose, but words – and images – are all we have to identify those things, to approximate them so that others might know what we know, see what we see, feel what we feel when we know and see and feel those real things.

Like puffy clouds in the bluest Louisiana sky.