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
4/29/2018
Below freezing. A few snowflakes swirl past. Inside, the resident mouse dashes from errand to errand, unaware that this is a day of rest.
4/28/2018
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.
4/27/2018
The rain peters out, and the daffodils stop bobbing to its beat like headbangers. A gnatcatcher resumes its sallies from the lilac bush.
4/26/2018
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.
4/25/2018
The birds seem unusually active; there must be a fresh bloom of aerial plankton. Even the brown thrasher brings his jazz to the yard.
4/24/2018
Kinglets drop down out of the trees to join the gnatcatchers hawking insects in the yard. They sing, feint, flash eponymous ruby crowns.
4/23/2018
Two blue-gray gnatcatchers take turns sallying forth from the lilac, zigzagging, hovering to hoover their namesake prey from the cool air.
4/22/2018
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.
4/21/2018
Latticework below the porch has been pushed out, presumably by something that lives under the house. A pileated woodpecker’s mad laughter.
4/20/2018
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.
4/19/2018
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.
4/18/2018
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.
4/17/2018
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.