Weather Sampler

Fascinating weather on the drive home from Thanksgiving at my daughter's in central NY.  I got a sampler of snow, sunshine, hail, wild wind, majestic clouds in shades from white to black ... and upon my arrival home, a gorgeous moon with a rainbow ring around it. I stopped along the way to take this photo of the ice on my windshield.

Click on image to enlarge.  Photo taken Saturday, 11/24/12.

Interior Clouds

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things

 which escape those who dream only by night."

 -- Edgar Allan Poe, from "Eleonora"

My window, my interior clouds, my daydream.  The camera had fun capturing this one, the image peeking out from reflections.  This carried me floating through the mysterious atmosphere to another quote, from an old song I kept listening to on my vacation drive.  These lines leaped out to me, and I had to hear them again and again:

"Somebody could walk into this room

And say your life is on fire ...."

-- Paul Simon, from "Crazy Love"

Such a fire theme in my life these days.  Pondering ... if your life is on fire, what do you save?  And what do you leave to the flames as you turn your back?

Reading the Sky

Walking downhill on my road at the end of April, my friend and I came across clouds like smudged words in the sky. I wandered ("lonely as a cloud"?) through a book here on North American weather, a thrilling find. According to the photos -- and with no true understanding -- the closest I came to naming them was altocumulus undulatas, under "middle clouds." Well, whatever they were, they were quite beautiful and mysterious. It was like finding an erased message written on a blue chalkboard. What did it say?

The poet is like the prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

-- Charles Baudelaire, "L'Albatros," st. 4, from Les Fleurs du Mal (1861)

The photo was taken 4/29/10. Click on image to enlarge.

The Real Sky Was Better

Tonight's sunset: the inky trees were crosshatched over the blue and rosy stripes of clouds. I like the tangled nest of lines gathered at the lower right, with the last pastel light peeping through. It was well worth braving the icy air to go for a walk earlier in the day. Later on, coming home with groceries, I drove beneath these gorgeous colors. I grabbed my camera to try to capture the fading sunset from my neighbor's driveway. The real sky was so much better, unwilling to live inside my camera.

I wish you all a creative and colorful 2010!

To enlarge the image, click on the photo.

Cloud Fire

More than a thousand words! Last evening's towering clouds in Connecticut were magnificent, alive with shifting orange light and an occasional tinsel-flash of horizontal lightning.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The quote was found in The Harper Book of Quotations, Robert I. Fitzhenry, Ed., HarperPerennial, 1993. Click on image to enlarge.

Sky Drain

Here's another photo from Alder Lake in the Catskills, in Ulster County. (See previous post.) I love the way the sky appears to be serenely slipping down the drain. Time washing over the edge, softly disappearing. It was a very good day.

For your reading pleasure, I've retyped "Sending You," a beautiful poem by Ray Gonzalez from his book, Consideration of the Guitar:

SENDING YOU
I am sending you a piece of sycamore bark.
-- Paul Celan

I am sending you the shadow from
my cottonwood tree, making sure

it extends over the river to reach you.
I include the leaves in my mother’s hair,

the brittle flashes of brown that
stuck to her at my birth.

I am giving you the roots from
excavated ground, their arms

reaching as far as the stone wall
where my fathers scrawled their names.

I have not forgotten the mud
from their swollen feet, rain

washing it off their labor, carrying it
beyond the storm to dry at your door.

I am delivering a cloud floating
in the sky as a memory that will

find you on the other side, passing
you flowers that grew on the earth,

their seeds the touch you needed
when you were the source of love.

I am mailing you a letter, my words you heard
when you were the sunlight that came and went,

transferring your fire into me
in the same way it burned you.

I am sending a piece of those ashes.
They spell my name as they fall into the canyon

washed out by the river, the shadow of my
cottonwood moving in the direction I came.

-- Ray Gonzalez

This poem was reprinted here with the permission of the author, Ray Gonzalez. It appears on page 16 of Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems, BOA Editions, 2005.