The sky is mangy, with blue patches showing through, and the yard is leprose with tracks. A rabbit twitches under the deer-ravaged rosebush.
Cold and overcast. A grooming cardinal reaches under his wings, dining on lice. Juncos peck grit from the road to replenish their gizzards.
Sleek silhouette of a sharp-shinned hawk. In the rosebush’s densely scribbled heart, the faint throbbing of something with very small bones.
Sparkles on the snow seem to float on another plane. Tree branches closest to the sun shine like knights in armor from the rime.
A titmouse inspects the undersides of several limb-stumps on the dead cherry snag, its cap wobbling. Shadows fade in and out. It’s cold.
Snowflakes wander to and fro like alien spacecraft on reconnaissance missions: “All strangely quiet. Dominant species an arboreal rodent.”
Juncos in the stream, juncos in the barberry bushes, juncos on the driveway, juncos in the lilac. Junco tracks in the snow beside my chair.
Flakes in the wind—not from the clouds, but the ground. A large, dried oak leaf curled like a boat floats down and lands on the snow.
Snow piles up on branches, as if the white sky were descending on a chaos of ladders. Only a woodpecker’s soft tapping breaks the silence.
Fire sirens. A wren’s burble. In a tree at the woods’ edge, two crows jeering a raven fall silent when it flies right over their heads.
A fresh six inches of snow. Most tree branches have been swept clean by the wind, but the rose bush harbors a tangle of snowy canes.
Has the sky been this gray all month, looking white only because there was no snow for comparison? A pair of ravens fly low over the trees.
Melting snow drips onto the porch roof. A crow lands at the top of a locust, the tallest soapbox around for his predictable denunciations.
A gray squirrel explores a walnut tree, nose down, following each limb to its end. I decide it’s searching for seeds cached by the birds.