Skywatch

It’s like living in a clam, the sky is mother-of-pearl, bubbled rainbow relief, dizzy blue depthless depth of metaphor. The sky is light.

My father once said that, since I was a writer and all, that he wanted to hear how I would describe a strange and glorious sky. Typically, I could think of nothing to say, so he went on to talk about weather patterns.

So, one winter a few years ago, I decided to take him up on his challenge, describing the sky every day as I stepped outside — though, after my fashion, in emotional impressions rather than with scientific accuracy that I am too ignorant to reproduce and through which I am too dense to see the poetry (he is not; he probably cares more about nature than I do).

I love the seasons and would like to share a bit of that love with you, so I will try to connect them with their times of year, though I do not remember when all of them were from — this one was, I believe, written earlier than the others, in August or September, but most of them were from December.

In other words, I shamelessly ignore this injunction, taken from an example of formal thought disorder in DSM-IV: The Clinical Interview:

never recreate a ribboned layer of all times