Charles Burchfield, Journals, August 31, 1914

     A warm windy day. Sky opaquish. White plastered clouds. I long to lie on the streaky Dutchman’s hill where the oaks snap windy against the blue, and the chestnuts stiffen windshot against the opaquish sky.

     The rising sun sends a shower of brick dapples across the filmy sky.

     Where the tree-sparrow satisfies his delicate passion in mid air.

     I have been thinking of that bubbly shower the other day and have been imagining a shower of big bubbles of all sizes. Blown by fairies with morning-glories as pipes & whirled by a cool wind they come showering thru the air mirroring the sky & clouds above and the earth beneath, enveloping a morning whitened maple; bursting to a shower of mist-dust in a hawthorne flecking a calm river to carry the air down­stream; turning the air to a dissolving rainbow with their wonderful colors; a soft caressing shower thru which we can still see the sky & earth, as thruirridiscent glass, the air full of the soft bursting of bub­bles, some unite and form hexagonal clusters; a sparrow hawk, a swallow, a killdeer or a night hawk blundered thru were startled at the great flock of reflections around themselves as they gazed saw themselves shattered into air - and shooting thru bubbles even after retaining some of their sheen.

    At sunset hour see swift-like bird circling the heavens in silvery flight. I notice bars on its wing. H - sees it & says it is a night hawk. (I looked it up later. Gootsucker family of which Whip-poor-will is member. Neither hawk, nor a night bird. Some of its other names are more poetical as Nightjar, Bull-bat, Will-o-the-wisp, Pish, Pyramidig.

   Back-mottled brown & rufous with yellow & white spots. Wavy bars of brown on breast.

   White spot on neck.

   “Harsh whistling note while on wing, followed by a vibrating booming whirring sound that Nutall likens to ‘the rapid turning of a spinning-wheel, or a strong blowing into the bunghole of an empty hogs heads’”

    It seems to bend the tips of its wings in its steely flight. All the birds of the air have this silveriness of flight from their long association with the ethereal upper air perhaps.

    Evening. To open air concert. Why do people come down? While Grieg was being played the air was alive with the hum of talking & laughing. I wonder if humanity is like the individual: with civilization as its ideal, the achievement of which must mean failure?

    The imagination makes such concerts. The drum must have been filled with sand. The horns “broke” at times like youth with a changing voice, or as in yod­eling. A fine ear can imagine the music as it ought to sound. 

Charles E. Burchfield,     August 31, 1914