The metronome has long featured in Halsey Rodman's iconography of time and space, appearing in his cast iron, ceramic, and works on paper pieces. He traces his exploration of the time and tempo keeper, first popularized by Johann Maelzel's mechanized version, to a chance encounter at MoMA with the metronome featured in Matisse's 1916 painting The Piano Lesson.

In these three drawings of metronomes, The Wind at Night (C), shadows cast sequentially by a rapidly wilting clipping of mugwort are traced left to right in graphite, contained within the sweeping spaces of the metronome forms. Mugwort is an invasive herb with medicinal qualities that has escaped cultivation to overpower meadows and roadsides throughout the Northeast. Representing the power and indifference of plants to human consideration, it carries both healing and destroying potential.

As one part of a small series of works titled The Wind at Night, Rodman explains that "the title was inspired by the almost constant wind in the high desert of Southern California: the rocks sit still but the plants shift and shake in the breeze, a flow of difference continuing whether we are there to witness this movement or not."