Your meteorology app fails and you turn
to art’s reliable confusions – clouds and seas,
moonscapes and desert Gethsemanes,
those pared-back, Umbrian beauties made
by Piero or Giotto, say. Paintings, dependable
as dogs in storms, frame dream atmospheres,
as if to say, look, see how unstable weather once blew
the roof off this or that Brueghelian peasant cottage
in Breda, not far from the tip, oh, about
five hundred years ago, townsfolk angling bodies
against bitter sleet that might at any time turn
into snow’s soft, noiseless death,
the painter summoning multiple weathers
(not good science or glaciology per se),
something just as complicated and subtly felt.

Now the nightly weather girl/boy terrorises,
the dupe of ‘natural cycles’ refused with toothy cheer.
Your app restores; its wild-feed wisdoms beg you look
more closely at the space beyond art:
the poisoned river, the jaded lake of home.

You try working in a foreign city, but plug no charger
into its humid histories. Inside the disturbed museum,
weightless, paper-scrolled old weather is kept
in hushed, dark spaces. Meanwhile, the weather
of work and a short life are yours. You wear a new shirt
to the office, buttoned down under a dark December sky,
wet season lasting too long, draining a sulphurous fug
of frangipani and run-off through choked gutters.
One weekend you visit a lush river valley out of town.
The tropical overhang is postcard perfect, but the river
is orange, the stream a green anime. At dusk,
the water’s chartreuse tints fade. You fill up
on the way home, your car garlanded by rainbows
of thin gasoline on concrete, industry’s old art.
You’ll revisit the river soon, sometime late
in the day and try your own hand at watercolour,
subtle impressions, as briefly felt as
a typhoon’s deathly, dependable beauty.

A. Frances Johnson