No Storm

There are moments that are all mist, and I am brushed by an icy veil that dissolves at my touch. Each breath is saturated with damp, and even the dead of night darkles with a wet sheen. Drops of water gather, hang unseen from leaf-tip and pine needle, grow plump and ever more pendulous, and then, stretched to their limit by gravity's pull, fall at last, breaking the stillness as they hit some lower leaf, or rooftop, or wet patch of ground. All the night is a soft, slow drumming. Without intent, I form accompanying music in my mind, and the song is like deep, distant woodwinds, and plucked strings, and faint, glassy chimes. Half imagined, dim shapes flit from shadow to shadow like breaths of fog. They might be ghosts of woodland spirits, wandered from some ancient myth to find this silent town and seek among its remaining trees their fellow wanderers, my vague thoughts, always trending from this faded world.

Gray

These obstinate clouds refuse to either disperse or produce a proper rain. They hang unmoving, like those perpetual clouds which have endured a century or more in Pissarro's cityscapes. Here is no Paris, though, but only the weedy fields and shadowy woods, and the small houses ranked along asphalt streets that would be as gray as the sky, were it not for the strew of colorful leaves and golden brown pine needles which now carpets them. Above the houses and their smoking chimneys, a crow flies between two pines. It perches for a moment at the tip of one, emits a few loud caws, then flies back to land at the top of the other, a hundred yards distant. The performance is repeated several times. Perhaps the crow, too, wishes to summon rain from the bleak sky. It fails. Day fades, without a proper sunset. Moonless night is roofed with black slate.