Bright sun, cloudless sky. A ways off through the woods, the sudden swoop of a hawk, shining feathers melting back into shining twigs.
April 2018
April 29, 2018
Below freezing. A few snowflakes swirl past. Inside, the resident mouse dashes from errand to errand, unaware that this is a day of rest.
April 28, 2018
Sun warms the porch; a rising buzz of flies. Each spicebush around the farm is yellowing up on its own schedule, bud to fuzz to frowze.
April 27, 2018
The rain peters out, and the daffodils stop bobbing to its beat like headbangers. A gnatcatcher resumes its sallies from the lilac bush.
April 26, 2018
A blue wound opens in the clouds and heals over again. In the garden, pink claws that may become peonies if a late frost doesn’t kill them.
April 25, 2018
The birds seem unusually active; there must be a fresh bloom of aerial plankton. Even the brown thrasher brings his jazz to the yard.
April 24, 2018
Kinglets drop down out of the trees to join the gnatcatchers hawking insects in the yard. They sing, feint, flash eponymous ruby crowns.
April 23, 2018
Two blue-gray gnatcatchers take turns sallying forth from the lilac, zigzagging, hovering to hoover their namesake prey from the cool air.
April 22, 2018
Cloudless and still. A pair of flickers inspect the old flicker den in the dead elm where a rat snake once swallowed all the hatchlings.
April 21, 2018
Latticework below the porch has been pushed out, presumably by something that lives under the house. A pileated woodpecker’s mad laughter.
April 20, 2018
Bright sun, icy breeze. Between creaks of a tree, a turkey’s gobble: like the engine turning over in a clown car. Daffodils bob and sway.
April 19, 2018
I slept in, but what have I slept into? Rain. No, snow. No, sun. The wind roaring on the wrong ridge. Church bells ringing in town.
April 18, 2018
Egg-white sky with one sun over medium. It’s cold. I’m reading a line about roosters crowing just as the neighbor’s rooster begins to crow.
April 17, 2018
Snow in the air and here and there on the ground: unseasonable seasoning. A gray squirrel bounds up the gray road, all smoke and tailpipe.