By David Boris
An awning of grey, a ridge of green, a wall of wispy white, a scarf wrapped fluttering, but still… ripples running and colliding, endless motion, yet unmoved.
Icy tinged blue, a frozen river, again illusory motion and yet solid, a natural highway running up as a pass…
Perhaps a gleaming city hides in the clouds?
Icy flows, small fragments scattered as of broken glass shattered and dispersed by a once mighty fall. Can you trace them back to the point of impact?
But no, again the illusion of time and slow, subtle movements, gentle currents and ripples.
Sheer Cliffs loom up, straight and jagged, the green shimmers reflecting the haze and grey, but no sound of waves – a still shore.
Not a wave, nor a hint of splash – only stillness. Stone dark, smooth and polished as glass, looking black and slick with a sheen of oil, yet dry as bone.
A white snake descending from above ending at a cascading plummet to trickle, to splash, but somehow silent.
A face with many wrinkles moving down, cutting channels – white as from an endless spring in the sky, now a larger one roars a steady thunder.
Green clinging in patches like distant moss on grey stone. Flecks of yellow mirrored in teal waters with crevices and clefts deep and dark, slices at an angle with a grain, jagged.
Blue and white like teeth, row upon row, an icy wall marching back through a pass stopping abruptly at a grey sandy beach…
Lamplugh Glacier.
A grey fin slips through the surface, a sliver slicing into the stillness sending ripples – a warning of a beast that lies hidden below sight. Just as quickly gone with only spreading signals that it ever was there. Now the teal looks less safe hiding creatures massive and alien.
A held breath waiting, expecting sudden return, but minutes pass as breath is held, until at last a long sigh. Sanity is questioned, fears stilled and yet no attempt to dissuade can replace the majestic length of that fin.
All such vessels of wood now look small, no real protection from what lurks below. No longer a Master and Commander, now the leaf floating at the whim of forces moving below. Put back into a place of humility, a small sojourner in a very big world.
A splash of something small and grey – a fish or something else. Nothing seems quite as innocent and safe. Fear is a subtle thing made from substance, but it too spreads like ice invading, cascading, creeping without palpable motion, yet now encroaching.
A tuft of yellow in a vast sea of green on grey, like a fiery reminder of beauty, a gemstone set in an unremarkable fixture but with a grand scale.
When does wispy fog become a cloud?
The upper slopes in blankets of white, but not snow, clouds wrapped like swaths of snow like a still flow, but here and there a tree in the fog juts up, dark green among a light green slope, shrouded in mist.
Atheist to Elder 