A cloud drifts across the moon, and in nine short lines it becomes a sleeping cat, a litter of grey kittens, a row of extinct volcanoes and, finally, a milk supply for angels. In Michael John Pickering's poem nothing stays what it was for longer than a line, which is just what the title promises. An epithet is a descriptive tag hung on a thing, and these tags are "on the run": each is dropped almost as soon as it has been caught.
The poem begins mid-conversation. "Hey, there's a cat / asleep there / in front of the moon!" has the breathless tone of someone nudging a friend. The exclamation mark and the casual "Hey" make the speaker sound spontaneous, even childlike, and the doubled "there" works like a pointing finger. Then comes the sensible correction: "It's a cloud of course". The "of course" is slightly embarrassed and slightly superior, the voice of an adult who knows better. But the correction does not win. The next sentence begins with "but", and instead of settling for the cloud the speaker pushes on: "do you see grey kittens / on the moon's surface?" The question recruits the reader. We are not told to believe in the kittens, only asked whether we can see them, which is a more generous request.
The dash at the end of that line is the hinge. After it the poem moves to its strangest idea: the kittens "are the dead / volcanos that give milk / to Jacob's angels." The logic is that of a dream, but it is not random. Grey patches on the moon's face can look like small animals. Kittens need milk, and the moon is pale and milky. A volcano, which normally pours out fire, is made to pour something gentle. The word "dead" matters here. These volcanoes are finished, their violence over, yet they still give, a small paradox of nourishment coming from what has ended. The word also echoes "asleep" in the second line, as if the moon were a place where rest and death are close neighbours.
"Jacob's angels" is the one phrase that reaches outside the poem. Many readers will think of Jacob's dream in the Book of Genesis, where angels move up and down a ladder between earth and heaven. The wording suggests that allusion, and if it is intended, the poem's shape imitates the image. It climbs rung by rung, from a domestic cat on a windowsill sky to something holy, and no rung is final.
The form suits this restlessness. There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. The lines are short, between three and six syllables, and they tumble forward with the punctuation, exclamation, question, dash, as fast as the speaker's thoughts. Sound does some quiet binding work in place of rhyme. A hard *c* or *k* runs through "cat", "cloud", "course", "kittens" and "milk", so the images keep changing while still sounding related. The only word that repeats exactly is "moon", named in the third line and again in the sixth. It is the one fixed point, the stage on which everything else is renamed.
The poem matters because it shows how metaphor works. It treats metaphor less as decoration than as a habit of looking, a way the mind keeps making sense of a shape it cannot quite pin down. "Cloud" is the correct answer, and the poem admits it, but it treats correctness as a small thing beside what the imagination can add. It is also funny. The leap from sleeping cat to heavenly dairy is absurd, and the poem knows it, which keeps the tone light instead of solemn.
The ending leaves the reader looking up. The final full stop closes the sentence but not the process, since the angels are as unverifiable as the kittens. The poem asks us to enjoy seeing wrongly and creatively, and to notice that the first name we give a thing is rarely the last.