A jet drags a vestigial contrail through the treetops, its roar far behind in the great blue bell which, by cliché, this clarity resembles.
Plummer’s Hollow
Palefaced sky with its one glowing orifice. The woodpeckers are busy with surgeries, removing delicious infestations from limb after limb.
At blue noon the wailing of fire engines. Mountain laurel leaves gleam in the sun. A cold ladybird’s slow plod.
Under a low, dark cloud ceiling, the echoing call and response of two mourning doves. A quiet gurgle from the stream. Not a breath of wind.
Warm sun, soft shadows. Two red-bellied woodpeckers: one trills, the other rasps. I think of Ecclesiastes: “But the earth abideth forever.”
An almost-out sun slowly erases the morning’s hoarfrost, except on the stream banks, where ferns of ice still hang over the dark water.
Cold, with an icy breeze that creeps under both my hoods. A dusting of snow. The distant sound of a door slamming shut.
Sunlight filtered through thin clouds looks somehow warmer than it is. Silence embellished by the resonant knocks of a pileated woodpecker.
Under a leaden sky, rain-fattened patches of moss between the trees are the brightest things. A passing shower’s patter on dead leaves.
The sun peeks through a hole in the clouds, turning the drizzle into a feathery shimmer—visual equivalent of the finches’ endless warbling.
Eyes shut to the strong sun, I watch the shadow-flicker of meltwater dripping from the eaves, the icicles letting go like vestigial tails.
A half-inch of wet snow blew in so fast, it’s plastered to the sides of trees in lumps. From up on the ridge, the white noise of the wind.
Fog. Trees reduced to their most elemental architecture: an outline, a few brush strokes, nothing. Antagonists to an invisible woodpecker.
Sky gray as the skin of a corpse. An internal combustion engine’s profane orison. Some small bird hammering at the seed of a sunflower.