fiery cloud dragon

fiery cloud dragon

chasing the setting sun

into the maw of earth

Amazing sunset cloud dioramas during these late autumn days. One looks like a dragon with wings of fire chasing the golden orb. Another looks like a river of vermilion fire, while yet another looks like little wavelets on the ocean. Nature-made and man-made clouds combine to create an effect like the streaks and squiggles in stained glass. And in another scene, one layer of inky clouds is raining wispy virgas, while the layer below it is sending streaks of rain upwards. How strange is that?

blue bellied clouds fringed

    

blue bellied clouds fringed

with rain falling on dry fields

ready for harvest

   Two days past the autumn equinox. It's been so dry all summer that some of the fields are ready for harvest early. Last evening I could hear the low roar of a combine in the cornfield to the east. In the morning the field lies shorn. Cold mist swaddles the swales, coating everything with heavy dew. By noon, a patchwork of blue-bellied cumulus clouds covers the sky. 
     I get out of the pickup truck on a gravel road between cornfields leading to a farm. The pale husks, spotted and streaked with mildew, are pulling away from the ears, which are beginning to drop down on the dark red stalks. The dull brown dirt between the rows is dry and barren. Nothing but corn grows in this soil laced with pesticides and herbicides, except a few gray grasshoppers with yellow wings and one bristling green burr in the row at the edge of the field. Close to the farmhouse a wide swath has been combined, perhaps a test strip to determine the moisture content of the corn, which has to be dry before harvesting. The ground is littered with chopped stalks, shredded leaves, splayed husks, broken brick-red cobs and a few golden yellow kernels. Walking into the field, I am exposing myself to the chemical brew, but our meadow borders a field -- corn one year, soybeans the next -- and when the wind blows toward the house, we inhale toxins.
     In the evening I stop again at the same spot to watch the sunset. In the west the clouds have turned dark blue with a slanting fringe of rain falling through deep pink sky on the horizon. One of the clouds looks like a giant shark with a gaping mouth full of needle sharp teeth about to swallow some small sea creature. While I'm watching the sky show, the farmer turns in, stops and rolls down his window. "It's beautiful," I say, to explain what I'm doing parked on his road. "The cornfield, the clouds, the sunset." He smiles and nods, then asks me where I live, by way of establishing who I am. Since I'm a near neighbor, all is well. I ask him how the harvest is going. "I was going to do the field by the house tomorrow, but it's too wet." 
     Just down the road, a combine is working a field of soybeans. The green and yellow John Deere looks like some kind of gigantic insect with its wide rack of conical teeth combing through the rows. In the dusk, with lights flashing and huge knobby tires kicking up a stream of dust in the dry field, the driver hurries to beat the downpour.

lone blue cloud trailing

lone blue cloud trailing

a curtain of rain over

a strip of cornfields

An isolated rain cloud moving east leaves a stripe of dark wet on the blacktop, indicating the width of its path. On either side, the pavement remains dry gray, the corn shocks faded green. It's mid-August, the height of summer in the Midwest, but leaves are turning yellow and beginning to drift down in the slightest breeze. I have been shaking my Peruvian rainstick at the passing clouds, but the clouds are not responding to my plea. Still, it is soothing to upend the stick and listen to the pebbles trickle down the long, hollow tube. As they hit the cactus thorns, which have been driven through the dry cactus to the hollow interior, they make a sound like rain falling. Although the sound does not fill the cracks in the ground or slake thirsty roots, still it falls on my hope and keeps it growing.

a lozenge of blue

a lozenge of blue

sky engulfed by dark rain clouds

trailing wispy virgas

After days of dark clouds and rain, I suddenly see this patch of blue sky in the west, holding out against the encroaching storm. We jokingly call this phenomenon a "blue cloud." The marbled gray clouds are pregnant with water, some of it dropping down in virgas, wispy strands of rain that evaporate before reaching the ground.

ribbons of rain clouds

ribbons of rain clouds

streaming down from the arctic

over the golden dome

We've had so much rain this spring. Must be global warming. All that ice melting in the Arctic. The air heating up with greenhouse gases. The storms seem to be stronger, last longer. Flood warnings every day. And yet there is this unexpected beauty in the sight of banners of gray and white striped clouds spanning the western sky, moving fast, bringing more rain.