Peonies have broken ground: skinny red claws reaching for the light. The whining clucks of a hen turkey separated from the flock.
Four gray squirrels interrupt their chasing to scold the feral cat—a Two Minutes’ Hate. In the corner of my eye, the zip of a winter wren.
The sun glows faintly through the clouds like a coin at the bottom of a fountain. Three flickers bicker above the springhouse.
Even the invaders’ spring is late: barberry, lilac, multiflora rose just now leafing out, the hated myrtle purpling what used to be a lawn.
Where the moon had glowed through ground fog at 4:00, now the sun glimmers. Four ruby-crowned kinglets flutter in and out of the lilac.
An accelerated tapping on the roof—who ordered rain? One bird says Konkerlee, another, Drink your tea. Takes me a second to sort them out.
The thin forsythia at the woods’ edge is in bloom at last. Two towhees battle over territory: rival renditions of the same six-note trill.
The rain’s stopped, and high winds rearrange the clouds, holes opening and closing as if in a game of chance: guess which one hides the sun.
A morning so dark, the spring peepers call between showers. At the wood’s edge, slow as a dream, a blue-headed vireo repeats its only line.
Morning full of the cries of woodpeckers—part ululation, part rusty hinge. Like the sounds the trees make in a winter wind, speeded up.
Sun! The gobbling of a turkey on the far side of the field, echoing off the ridge, sounds as if it’s coming from the clear blue sky.
Incessant rain. A chitter of goldfinches halfway through their molt: part green, part yellow, like spicebush or forsythia in reverse.
The red maple blossoms are open at last, puffs of red anthers or orange pollen. A white-throated sparrow sings without stopping in the rain.
The dead cherry beside the porch is greening up, radiant with algae. I take deep lungfuls of actinomycetes spores, that odor of earth.