Overcast

Night draws a veil, fold upon fold, gathered to dim the light, to make the moon an uncertain brightness that moves west while growing ever more vague. The marbled sky is etched by the mulberry twigs which soon will vanish among dense foliage. Cooling house timbers crack like knuckles, the sharp sound snaps the silence which quickly returns, deeper for the interruption. Then it yields once more, for a moment, to the high chirp of a night bird who calls four times, five times, each call fainter as it flies north, to be lost in the forest. Again, silence reclaims the pale world. Hours have passed and not a sound from the frogs. Every breath is dense with dampness, and the silent, sleeping town seems as though it has been drowned in the ghost of a lake and is lost, never to be rediscovered.

( Sunday Verse )

Wet

As dusk fell, rain began, the last light illuminating the vaporous gray of scudding clouds, the detail draining from the world and being replaced by the sound of water. Night now washed in the songs of rills turns cold, and wind has risen to shake the early blossoms. Today I saw small leaves, not yet green, bursting from the oaks. The cherry tree shows no sign of leaf or bud, though. Perhaps it is wiser than the other trees, or perhaps it is dead.

Oh, thunder! That was unexpected. I must shut Sluggo down, in case of power surges.

Blague

Well, look what Google AdSense fetched for me! There's yet another new web publishing tool! This one, from a startup headed by a guy who used to work for Apple, is free for the moment, being in beta, but will cost fifty bucks a year and up later on. A lot of people will probably like the idea of being able to publish from their desktop rather than a browser. More competition for 6A. Maybe MovableTripe and LJ will have to develop similar user tools to keep up.

Update: Here is an article about it. And here is their news and press release page. An active publicity department, to be sure.