Moon Through Cloud

Watching the intermittent occlusion of the moon by swirling clouds, and the pale colors refracted by suspended ice crystals, I think about the dust and water of which they are formed. It is the same water which has circled the sky before, flowed through rivers and washed shore-ward with rock-eroding tides, been boiled for tea to be drunk from painted china cups or wooden bowls, been gulped from fountains by Roman legionnaires and from ladles by dust-choked farmers, been splashed by birds fluttering in suburban gardens and by elephants in muddy African ponds, been sweat out by toiling laborers and beasts with two backs, has fallen as rain over and over and always lifted back to the sky by the power of the sun. And the dust has been farm soil and dirt under nails and carbonized wood from fires, has risen from volcanoes, drifted, settled, been stirred by the wind and lifted again and again, has been flesh and bone, or newsprint covered with now forgotten stories, buffalo dung on the prairies, grit between the cracks of city sidewalks, ash on foreheads, incense wafting through churches, clothing on cremated corpses, buildings in London or Dresden or Hiroshima, swept from simple huts and beaten from expensive carpets, swirled in the eddies of rivers and the tanks of sewage treatment plants, mingling with water with which it will mingle again in the high fields that float above the world and bring rain, and return the dust to the soil. The colors I see tonight are beams of twice reflected light, and around them swirls the world, ancient, mutable, arcane.

Spring Rain

The rain is back, sprinkling lightly at first through the soft grey afternoon and then, in the darkening evening, falling faster, soaking the ground, pooling, trickling, rushing, wearing things away. I am aware that I am repeating myself, old images running through my mind, like the same rain falling year after year. The past erodes and comes back changed, but still the same thing, a variation of what has been, like a persistent theme in another key. How many paintings of the cathedral did Monet do? How many water lilies, variations of one another, became further variations under his brush as it moved across the canvas like clouds across the sky, dropping the rain that would reshape the world? All my thoughts are rain, and erosion, and returns that are never quite the same and never new.