This poem started off in my notebook.  I keep my notebook with me at all times and I write in it every day.  I would like to say that it is packed with profound thoughts and scintillating poetic lines which demand to be made into poems.  But that would be a lie!
     Often the daily entry is of astounding ordinariness like, 'A very slow swim today.  I wonder why?' or 'Well, at least I have another pen now' or 'So, today is Friday and not Saturday.'  Sometimes something more substantial comes of these musings because I do believe (from past experience) that writing something/anything can release imagination and the aleatory is a great source of literary development!
     So, the first entries before the source of this poem were comments about the weather and the fact that my smartwatch was failing to load my daily swims to the app on my phone which monitors my progress.  I was wondering why the phone had only recorded that I had swum 200Km when, surely I must have swum more, when the cloud of cigarette smoke drifted my way and I picked up bag and tea and moved to a more distant table.
     It was after my displacement that I moaned a little more about the weather and began to think about the sky and what I expected from it - and that is how the poem got going.
     My less than flattering mention of the painter Jean Dubuffet stems from my one and only visit to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.  This building is one that I have known about ever since I was a kid and had a Sunday Times (in the days when the paper was worth reading) poster of architecture.  This had a few drawings of two buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, one was the Kaufmann house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania and another was the museum in New York.  I have been fascinated with the architect and especially with these two buildings since that time and you can imagine that I was excited finally to visit one of my key architectural sites and especially to see the art it contained.  
     Of all the artists having a special exhibition that could have been there, Dubuffet would not have been in my top few hundred artists.  But there he was in awful painting after awful painting!  I hated them.  I hate them.  The exhibition was in 1981 - which shows you how long my resentment can last!  And I want to go back and enjoy a better exhibition!  Some day.
     Anyway, it was good to remember my trip to the US of A and one day I am determined to go and see Falling Water for myself, as the Guggenheim is the only Frank Lloyd Wright building that I have seen in the flesh.

Expectation

Downwind of smokers

I soon moved away,

and tutting silently

I looked upwards,

as sky always

returns

a glance.

            But not today.

Today the sky is chaos.

No touch of the sublime.

A random scattering

of dirty-bluey-greys.

All childish smudges,

daubs: Dubuffet – failed!

Half-hearted, full of thumbs.

Half-finished messiness,

that smears against my eyes.

But I persist,

and gaze, and find

acceptable abstraction

in the view,

            and make

a metaphor to tidy things

and justify the look.

I like to think that the last stanza and the last lines of the previous stanza can be taken to refer to Dubuffet as well as the sky.  In conjunction with the title, I think that there is something in this poem about making the most of what you see however uninspiring it might appear at first glance!  After all 'abstraction' is a taking out - and that process is up to the individual and the effort made to make something of it.