Enormous tumbleweeds of wind cycloning in off the plains tonight--jangling the windowpanes like a glass tambourine while the windchimes dance a spastic, frostbitten tarantella. The bathroom fan clatters open and shut like a mechanical high hat. Wind so strong that, from a distance, it sounds like the dramatic rumbling of timpani mallets rolling thunder and storm forward from the back of the orchestra.

I love the unease, the unsettledness of the wind. I love how it gives anxiety an exteriority. How its excessive spectacle, its hubristic grandiosity--the Romantic grosse fugue of it--can't help but shift one's focus away from the obsessions of the interior--which, lately, feel too much like endlessly fretting over tiny puzzle pieces in a mismatched puzzle that will never go together anyway.

Cold drizzle on snow today. Slipperiness and treacherousness and mess. What else is there to do but put on sensible shoes and tread carefully?

And yet . . . the horizon this evening marbled with creamy streaks of orange and raspberry sherbet. The band of darkness that wraps each day like a tourniquet loosening its grip. There is a slight easing of things.

In the dark, the resolute stars with their obsolescent light from some other lifetime seem almost like an offering--a candle tribute mourning whom? Or what?

You'd think the wind would blow them all out and extinguish the sky. But it doesn't.