Aether

What the air was doing, held still long enough to look at: pictures of no place you could find again.

Sometimes a landscape is only a colour. A curtain of rain lit from behind, gold, with an eagle crossing it. The sun as a white coin in a cloud the colour of brass. A pink that lasts four minutes above a sea of cloud and then is gone. A glacier's peak catching fire at the last second of the day while the ice below it stays cold and blue. Ridges turning to paper as the haze takes them. A storm standing on the sea like a wall.

These are not pictures of places; you could not find any of them again. They are pictures of what the air was doing, held still long enough to look at.

I wait for these the way other people wait for a bird: knowing it may not come, and that if it comes it will not stay.