Mid-morning and the sun is just struggling free of clouds and/or smoke. A chicken cackles in the distance. Annual cicadas exchange raspy notes.
chickens
A gray-wool sky, periodically crossed by Vs of geese. The snowpack has shrunk to an archipelago of white ice. A neighbor’s chicken is crowing over her latest creation.
The merest shimmer of snow against the dark trees. The shriek of misaligned wheels on a lumbering freight train. One of the neighbor’s hens yelling her head off.
Overcast and cold. Ten minutes before sunrise, a yellow rent appears in the clouds. In the distance, the neighbor’s chickens start up a racket.
In the half hour it takes the first red cloud to become a sunrise, every crow in the area has a suggestion. Even a distant rooster weighs in.
A pileated woodpecker banging its head, crows denouncing a raven, a chicken cheering for her latest egg… the local dinosaurs are restless.
Weak sun. The bright blue of New York asters almost lost among the goldenrod. It takes me a moment to place a distant bird call: chicken.
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.
On the first morning of my married life, the sky is as blue as it gets. Phoebe, rooster, bluebird. The sparkle of frost gives way to sheen.
Had I not risen early I would’ve missed the sun, the rooster, two doves’ calls blending into something like the distant locomotive’s chord.
The neighbor’s rooster crows a few times and falls silent, as if appalled by the gloom. Even a chickadee manages to sound querulous.
Before dawn, the half moon’s flat edge passing through different types of clouds like a cheese knife. The neighbor’s rooster starts to crow.
Something sets off the neighbor’s rooster, and a few moments later a raven flies past the porch, croaking like a duck with laryngitis.
Bright sun, bitter wind. With the snow almost gone, the neighbors’ chickens must be out of their coop: the rooster crows and crows.