How Are Your Skies Lately?
Our newest smorgasbord! "The skies are not mine, except to behold..."
Note: This whole piece won’t fit into your email inbox! If (when) you get cut off before it ends, please just click over to the website to read the rest. That’s where the comments will be, for one thing. And we’d really love to see you in the comments, where you can give us your own response to the question du jour…
If you’re new here, let me quickly explain: this is how we celebrate the passage of time on Juke. Every three months, I send out a question to anyone who’s contributed (writing, art, etc) to Juke. They send back their responses and I gather them all into one big celebratory post—a smorgasbord.
For today’s smorgasbord, which celebrates our four year anniversary, I sent the question:
How are your skies lately?
The whole point is for everyone to respond however they’d like. They can take the question literally or metaphorically. They can send poems or photos or whatever. They could even make up another question for themselves and answer it instead, though no one’s tried that yet.
Inevitably, when all the replies come in, they join together in a way that’s just wonderful. I hope you agree. And I hope you’ll be inspired to join us in the comments!
I’ll go first…
Tonya Morton:
When I first moved to New York, I wondered if I would miss the skies out west. They were the primary thing I loved about Kansas. Blustery and dramatic, with clouds that dwarfed all the pocket-sized towns below. The blue skies and drifting meringue clouds on a mild summer day. The afternoon storms blowing in across the state line, veined with lightning.
Do I miss those big western skies? Yes. Sometimes. Though I don’t forget how many days in Kansas were cloudless. On those days, the sky was one flat plane of empty that stretched on forever.
And I would miss this sky too. Tonight Paul and I drove the Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn and flew up along the Belt Parkway, overlooking the docks and decaying grain silos, the illegal chicken coops and 24-hour video stores. Beyond the lit windows of all the third-story tenement apartments, the Brooklyn harbor sky was as big and majestic as anything. Blue and humid, with that early evening pale light that makes all the buildings below twinkle and shine.
A good sky is a good sky. Wherever it is, as long as it’s singing some kind of special song. With a corn field underneath, it’s good. It’ll knock your socks off over a wide, muscular river. What matters isn’t so much the sky itself. It’s the head that remembers to look up. Wondrous thing, the sky. How it never fades with age. Never goes out of style. And how you can always find it when you need it, no matter where you are or who you’ve grown to be…
Paul Vlachos:
My skies are foggy these days. Or sunny, and I can see across the whole country at once, and everything sounds clean, I can hear sidewalk conversations and the world gets sharp, but after dark the edges disappear and I just float around. The humid air smells strange, sound becomes a roar and there is no horizon, but the shadow moon is still there. I know that there is a sky, but I know it from the outlines. My skies are strange, so I look straight ahead, but sneak a look once in a while to see what’s going on upstairs. There is only one sky at any one time and it’s my sky. The sky is my blanket and stars guide the way and the moon is a mirror. At least the birds have a place to fly, the bees, too. The heavens make the earth. I tip my head up a tiny bit, crick my aching neck and there it is, just like closing your eyes to pray.
Damon Falke:
I tear myself from bed. I raise my hands and voice
in prayer to the skies and tip a pure, unmixed
libation on the hearth.
The Aeneid, Book Three, 215-217
Robert Fagles, translator
Since January I have been watching the skies through a vertical window. Grey skies mirrored in the sea. Misty skies. Snow filled skies and snow collected on the rooftops. Long skies, what in America they call big sky, extending to islands where I once fished but whose names I cannot remember. Skies across the port and above fjellheisen. Skies at night reflecting the city lights. I was on the 19th floor after all. Yet for the first time in weeks there are blue skies. Bright blue skies teasing the end of winter or the start of spring. There are skies with cloud formations the locals call makrellskyer. Skies from hillsides. Liquid skies above the petroglyphs of reindeer and fish etched long ago into the stone above the sea. Skies from the island where the German battleship T— was sunk. Three languages—Norwegian, German and English—are carved into the true steel of the battleship. Skies from the field where we stopped to share sunlight, tea and bread. Skies above the mountains across the fjord where people hike to ski. Skies from here on the ground, from the horse pastures, from the flattened hay fields and rows of unplanted gardens and raised beds. Skies above the place where I pressed my palms into thawing soil and stood up and stretched and felt glad that my hands were cold.
Ned Mudd:
things are what they are
and become other
things
then turn inward
swing shift, earth/sky
old gods taking leaveTabby Ivy:
Lately the skies over Carlton, OR, are beautiful. On some days white clouds are like big balls of cotton floating in front of a wall of clear cerulean blue. A blue so pure and infinite it seems to sparkle. Other days, especially at sunset, the palette turns to muted pinks and oranges.
It has been a very mild winter here, with more sunny days than usual. I fear the cost of those glorious rain-free and warmer days of December and January will mean hot and smokey days this summer. The inevitable wild fires will come, if not in Oregon, then elsewhere, in California or Canada.
As the crow flies we are less than fifty miles from the Coast, and the proximity to the ocean affects our skies. When we moved to Oregon I told my husband, “it feels like the Coast here”. Must be muscle memory from my California youth near the Pacific Ocean. The air feels and breathes differently here than in land-locked Montana. The prevailing winds from the ocean keep the skies active, as the clouds travel by in ever-changing shapes; the thinner ones disappearing like a whisper, the big bold ones making a distinct statement, taking proud ownership of their place in the sky.
Isn’t it funny how the skies can affect how you find yourself in the world. I once read something about what to do when feeling overwhelmed with life or locked inside your own head. Go outside and look up into the sky - you immediately feel unburdened, your heaviness eases, and you find yourself opening up to the world and to possibilities. I have tried this a few times, and indeed, it does work. When I do this during the day, especially in the morning, I feel lighter as my world opens up. But when I go outside and gaze into the night sky, I feel smaller, more humble in my insignificance as I look in awe at the immense and expanding void above.
Either way, looking into the sky can help us find our way, to possibilities or perhaps to ourselves.
Constance Christopher:
The skies are not mine, except to behold. The future is unclear, except for the fact that death follows birth. The times I am living in are inexplicable. The future will have to be done over. I'm not all right. And, why did we hire a home decorator who never sleeps to do over the executive mansion? I am perplexed, because it merely takes the red light of a camera to go on to add chaos to what is far beyond a teardown. Also, someone pointed out to me that a whole bunch of insane looking video games have the word “Teardown” in their title. What happened, anyone?
Matt Layne:
Okay, so, skies ... a friend of mine told me, years ago, that Gadzooks is a minced oath. What is a minced oath? I asked my friend. It's typically a curse that would have been deemed blasphemous. Said she. Gadzooks is derived from God's hooks meaning the nails in Christ's hands at the crucifiction. Just like zounds is derived from God's wounds. Tarnation, but I miss my brilliant friend, but back to those skies, I suppose I have hurled my fair share of oaths, minced and otherwise, at the skies of late. How so many of my fellow Americans still pledge allegiance to a naked emperor is befuddling (which by the way is not a minced oath, but rather derived from the obsolete word fuddle which meant to confuse, chiefly via alcohol). How so many who self-identify as Christians can continue to prop up a charlatan who masquerades as Christ, Himself, a week after Easter is down-right damnable. I'm not much of a praying man, but God have mercy on our souls.
Kirk Weddle:
Recently, I went way out West, 5 or 6 hours West of San Antonio, to Big Bend National Park. It’s right on the Mexican Border. We stayed in Marathon, population 410, and if that’s too much for you, travel on another hour and hit up Terlingua, population 190. It’s vast and sparse. That’s where you will find the sky. That’s where I found mine.
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton:
An early wake up to meet Aarón in town then an hour drive to the trailhead. The first five kilometers climb to the top of a volcanic ridge where the southern half of the island is visible in its entirety. Our host’s advice, “Make sure you wear sunscreen, a hat, and a long sleeve shirt to protect you from the sun…” A promise of limitless sky, a promise of visibility, promises that became shrouded in a permeating fog for the duration of the 20 kilometer trek. As I walked, the clouds moved around me, sometimes limiting visibility to the end of my arm, sometimes loosening to reveal an approaching hiker materializing mere meters away. The fog created a sense of mystery revealing beautiful contrasts in texture and color forcing me to look close. The fog left me with a chill that made my fingers feel like thick sausages. There were no grand views of the sky that day. There was no limitless expanse of sky and water to take in from atop newly formed volcanoes. The sky stayed close. The sky came down to earth.
Charlie Pepiton:
I am in a fog, pleasantly dissociative, hovering somewhere outside the studio where I taught this morning, and still looking in from a more volcanic, subtropical landscape. This is not merely jet lag talking. Rather, the hum is back. In the last few years, I've found when I leave the U.S. it takes two days for it to dissipate but at least a full week to stop hearing it again upon my return. Hum isn't the right word, but what better way is there to describe our national static? An odor, perhaps? A fog? At the time of writing, I am just 20 hours back to Spokane from, let's say, the Fortunate Islands. We were scouting locations for a new film, a story about searching for light and other worthy heartbreaks. The island's sky offers some of the finest stargazing opportunities and solar clarity in the Northern Hemisphere due to its relative humidity and position dangling off the edge of Africa with nothing between its shores and Brazil. Local laws and customs also protect the so-called starlight reserve. Its skies are uncannily active and clear. And there is no hum. I stood still and watched four satellites drift by. All seven of the Seven Sisters looked down.
Sue Cauhape:
We have what is called The Wave along the eastern Sierra Nevada. It’s a capricious current of air the cascades in an undulating pattern down the slope. It can hurl gliders thousands of feet into the atmosphere or plunge aircraft into the earth. Sometimes it drapes boas across the face of the mountain, or creates ethereal wisps that appear and disappear in minutes.
During the summer, it can pull moisture from the soil to form thunderheads that can drop 100 years of rain back to the ground or carry it to the other side of the Great Basin. After the storms, rainbows grace the skies, oftentimes in pairs.
When wildfires billow their debris into the heavens, clouds may bring rain to quench the flames … if we’re lucky. Our clouds can be petulant, stingy with their gifts or over-indulgent with the havoc they release.
Whatever their moods, the skies over Carson Valley remind us that breath-taking beauty can bring abundance or mayhem.
Jodie Meyn:
This is my humble brag that I’ve read the first volume of Proust in March and this quote was my favorite and applicable to your smorgasbord:
“May the sky remain for ever blue for you, my young friend; and even at the hour which is now approaching me, when the woods are dark already, when the night is falling fast, you will console yourself as I do by looking up towards the sky”
Maybe he means to keep your innocent belief in Art ? To hold tight to yourself? Don’t let the man get you down?
It has to be about creating our own circumstances.
I think all of us here strive to live under our own blue sky, the one we’ve made for ourselves.
Anthony Head:
About the sky.
Without a doubt, the color we found most often on the ceilings of Texas’s painted churches was blue. (My buddy Kirk Weddle has much better photos of the ceilings because he took the photos for the book we’re coming out with next year about these beautiful and historic churches. It’s worth the wait.) It’s no coincidence that blue was chosen for the ceilings of these churches, most of which were built between, roughly, 1850-1940; the artists and the local priests and pastors often wished to convey an interior atmosphere during worship services with little if any barrier separating the gathered community with God and the celestial skies.
At St. Paul Lutheran in Serbin, for example, it’s a flat blue color with a bit of stenciling at the edges. In this case, the indigo blue is a very culturally rich color for the Wends or Sorbs who settled the village in the mid-19th century and built this church in 1871.
In Panna Maria, the ceiling of Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church is a soft blue canvas for other ecclesiastic iconography. The painting dates back to the early 20th century while the edifice is from 1878.
In churches like Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Shiner (1921) and Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Dubina (1911) the different artists had similar intentions for showing the gorgeous sky above.
And certainly one of my favorite skies is seen at Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church in Moravia, built in 1913.
These churches are living churches and Kirk and I are truly grateful to everyone we met at these and all the painted churches of Texas. I’m really looking forward to getting this book out there in 2027. Until then, keep watching the skies!
Fran Gardner:
My skies are full of shadows and reflections. The stark and angled branches of winter trees are softening into a spring of green and pink. The sun, rising and setting, pulls the season forward. Golden light, lowering clouds, all in a single day.
My soul is checkered, varied as the sky. I am not the same person from instant to instant.
Sean Downing:
Postponed Thunder
my skies are
restless porcelain
neither cracking
nor holding
some days
a violent tenderness
opens above me
and I mistake it
for permission
lately there's been
a quality of postponed thunder
the air
holding its accusation
between teeth
the clouds move
with arthritic grace
going nowhere
slowly
at dusk
an unreasonable honey
bleeds through granite
lasting just long enough
to prove
nothing
my skies are
patient apocalypse
carrying their stubborn erasure
without apology
I used to scan them
for mercy
for warning
now I let them be
what they are—
indefinite ruin
beautiful
in their refusal
to resolve
the forecast says clearing
but my skies
subscribe to
a different honesty
they teach me
that some weather
doesn't pass
it just
becomes
the air you learn
to breathe