A Month Of Weather
And an angel.
Weather Diary
April 20th
9 degrees. A various cloudscape. Large slow hulks of white vapour. Poured smoke. Floating small shapes. Dashes and scars.
April 21st
10 degrees. Cloud. A cool day. From the fir trees, incessantly, the long, weeping notes of black-capped chickadees.
April 22nd
11 degrees. Rain. A dark day sinking into itself. Trees and lawns the twilight greens of a moss garden. Everything earthed, low, quiet.
April 23rd
8 degrees. Cloud. The mourning doves are back, already paired. Slender, delicate, smaller than any British pigeons, they perch on wires next to each other and do seem shy and tender. A rhythmical whirr from their wings when they fly.
April 24th
9 degrees. Warm silver cloud, lit from behind, darkening into rain. Then brief hail. Gutters and hollows are briefly packed with fishmonger’s ice, regular-sized pellets that shine and quickly melt away.
April 25th
10 degrees. Sun and large sailing clouds, what John Ashbery called ‘April galleons,’ very stately, dignified, elaborate. Still cold when the wind blows; you can feel winter still there beneath the warmth of spring like rock under grass.
April 26th
8 degrees. Cold sunlight. The young leaves are a lovely luminous colour, a light green the sun glows through like stained glass.
April 27th
12 degrees. Haze: a high, faint opalescence in the sky. A dime, interesting estrangement of trees and houses.
April 28th
13 degrees. A day of boisterous changeability: sun, cloud, and rain. The hours patched with colour and shade. Gloss, fade, mobile shadows, recovering shine.
April 29th
10 degrees. Fine rain, blowing like dust, swirling, ticking against the windows.
April 30th
11 degrees. Heavy rain, grey and consistent, mood-altering. Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme il pleut sur la ville, and so on.
May 1st
10 degrees. Sun and cloud.
May 2nd
7 degrees. Chiaroscuro. Again the flush of sunlight and the chase of shadows. Relaxing into rain later.
May 3rd
10 degrees. A downpour. The day surrendered to the rain.
May 4th
11 degrees. Weak rain. Clears away. It is illness weather – I mean, I am ill and the weather is outside, irrelevant, unfelt. Just grey and happening, running like an appliance.
May 5th
14 degrees, Sun through a broken sky. The glow of spring in the thickening green.
May 6th
18 degrees. Sun and clouds. The oriole in the oak tree has a list of questions, a liquid list, many questions on the same theme.
May 7th
16 degrees. The sunlight late in the morning is mysteriously galvanized. It takes on a metallic sheen, then stutters into rain that darkens everything to a glowing, aquarium green.
May 8th
19 degrees. Soft sun. Feathered clouds. Birds are quick and businesslike to and from their nests, busy with their parental duties. Butterflies now added to the picture: a spiralling red admiral. The dark velvet and yellow fringe of a mourning cloak.
May 9th
15 degrees. Sunlight. The feeling of the first day of summer as some critical mass of green has been reached. On many trees the leaves are out in full, lavish, stirring in the breeze.
May 10th
21 degrees. Some gentle white in the blue of the sky. The trees bask in light. The day hangs together like soft cloth. It is embroidered with migrant warblers, compact colours flitting between branches, darting at invisible flies.
May 11th
26 degrees. It is cloudy enough to make the birdsong pensive. Mourning doves blow their soft ocarinas. Robins test each other patiently with short, angular phrases.
May 12th
28 degrees. Full sun all day, a blasting lustre. And then in early evening, a silver wedding of clouds. They arrive all at once, as if meeting at an appointed time.
May 13th
23 degrees. Cloudless. The tiny shiny metal of an aeroplane at the tip of two long, lengthening white contrails: slowly unzipping the blue.
May 14th
18 degrees. The warmth has taken a step back. A chill reserve to the day, a cool indifferent breeze passing by.
May 15th
23 degrees. Sun and cloud. Now the leaves are full it is harder to see into the trees. The warblers and other small birds disappear into their shuttered green rooms.
May 16th
24 degrees. A gust of wind makes me see the newness of things. New forms everywhere, the deciduous world iterated again. It is the first time these particular leaves have rushed in this kind of turbulence and that the small, young squirrels out on a limb to eat blossoms and new leaves, have felt it too. The wind persists and by the end of the afternoon a cloudy day has blown clear and everything’s bright as if freshly painted.
May 17th
12 degrees. Sunlight and cold. A dissociation of the bright colours and unrelaxing temperature. At the edge of the pond in the park, an egret waits with its knife, and purple martins skim over the water’s surface, switching directions constantly, lithe as bats.
May 18th
15 degrees. Sun. Stillness. A frenzy, though, in the lives of the sparrows that have multiplied and are still breeding, males fighting, corners crammed with hungry young, constant calling from trees and nests, constant shuttling flights.
Youtube Treasure #12
Angel, 1957, by Joseph Cornell