New York City, November 4, 2014

★★★★★ The morning clouds were soft blurs, and lower in the sky was an eggplant-colored haze. The jacket, shed while hurrying off to the preschool teachers’ conference, stayed off afterward. Outside the polling place, each blade of grass stood erect and aglow. The warmth was not feverish but soft and springlike. A child crawled around on the sidewalk, circling its stroller, beside Broadway. The clouds’ shapes firmed up; they were high but not too high, so that the eye followed their curves beyond the rooftops, the sky insisting on its expansiveness. A smoky gray spread in the west late, with a rosy glow below it and a band of hot orange below that. White points of light shone in the Freedom Tower, and yellow ones in an unglassed building under construction to its right. In the east, in the night, a fuzzy halo surrounded the waxing moon. A man pissed in the shadow of a building face with a Niagara gushing roar. The moon looked small, framed in the cross street, like the disappointing moon in photographs. The clouds over it slipped aside.