Sky Train

What elements of this day were present, I wonder, on those earlier days in former springs, when the 6th of April clicked in on the Big Wheel? In 1483, in Italy, when the wife of a court painter gave birth to baby Raphael, was the sunrise pink & pearly, as it was this morning? Was the sky full of fast-moving clouds, as it is just now, their rain-filled comrades following in the big, eastbound, round-the-old-world sky train? Ever-changing, ever-young mural over our heads – man oh man, just think of that little boy growing up to grind and mix oils with pigments, ultramarine and cerulean and white lead, all the better to replicate that same, but not the same, sky in a painting of another heaven over the heads of painted prophets and angels.