Two pairs of pileated woodpeckers breakfast 100 feet apart, one on adjoining oaks and the other side by side on the trunk of a locust.
Thin fog. A yearling fawn play-mounts his mother, and is mounted in turn by his twin. A robin tut-tut-tuts from the driveway.
Frost has silvered the grass where a rabbit grazes, one hop away from a spreading patch of sun. When a crow flies over he flattens his ears.
A small cloud has lodged among the trees at the woods’ edge: shadbush in bloom. Dawn leaks through a dozen rifts in the overcast sky.
At mid-morning, the sky grows dark. Rumbles of thunder over the noise from the interstate. A small, white petal flutters down.
Woodpeckers drumming at sunrise. It occurs to me that they might not be telegraphing “I am here” so much as verifying that the world is.
A cold wind at sunrise. Daffodils nod, while the forsythia shakes its yellow fingers in a vaguely apotropaic gesture. Hard frost on the way.
Thick fog and silence, punctuated by the low, almost infrasonic throbs of a drumming grouse. The nasal cries of a fish crow pass overhead.
Rain. Two deer in a high-speed chase crash through the laurel, the one in pursuit grunting like a buck gone into rut eight months early.
The springhouse phoebe has already found a mate. They take turns fluttering up under the eaves to refurbish the 30-year-old nest.
Wind riffles the wild onion tops sprouting from a crack in the walk. Down at the end of the old corral, the pussy willow’s in bloom.
Sound is out of the east: a ululating quarry truck, a train whistle that won’t shut up. Clouds thin just where the sun is—a sudden glow.
The spicebush is a haze of yellow beyond the springhouse. Another too-warm morning. What will be left of spring by warbler time?
Myrtle, speedwell, bittercress: my garden is a crashed party of uninvited blooms. But as Orwell noted, spring in general is illicit.