The sun’s rays slant lower between the open aisles of the trees, and there is a keener, icier edge to the light. I walk out through a hollowed, dipping and waving landscape onto gray-green lichens, and dry, sweet-smelling grasses of an old field laced with briars, and the pale blue sky is on top of me with intoxicating height. The vapor trail of a jet plane cuts across the sky for miles, while slower clouds ease and change across the November blue, allowing lazy time for the imagination. But if to imagine is a dispensation from nature that allows us to take part in her intricate creativeness, then it is no idleness. Rationally, a cloud, whether cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, or a combination thereof, is what it is: a collection of drops of water, or ice particles, suspended in the air. Meteorology as a science must be one of the most intriguing, since its subjects never sit still. I would, if I could, make an analysis of the clouds that are typical of a season, the changes in pace that make themselves known overhead; though the old maritime men of Cape Cod could do a better job. They knew what they depended on, in the way of calm or storm, and predicted what they felt. Subjective interpretation is suspect these days, but it implies a common familiarity for which objective analysis offers no substitute. The sensate imagination, with its head in the clouds, finds interconnections past their specialty and name. Clouds, collecting moisture from the ponds, lakes, or ocean waters, have many of the shapes and patterns of the land, or head, if you like, that they come from. We can find faces in them, as well as in the dregs of a teacup; but they are the images of an invention that is more fluid than our own. Their texture may cause them to look like scratched, glacial rocks, or they are wooly and fibrous at the same time. They might suggest cocoons or the nest of fall webworms. They hang in snowy shoals or in striated banks. They ripple like the sands at low tide. They look like whitecaps on the sea. They move as slowly and inexorably as fields of ice, or in quick bursts ahead of the wind. They roll in mountainous abundance, or fan out like a river’s long fingers stretching out across a delta.