Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.
clouds
Damp, overcast and cool. The pussy willow I planted two years ago is in its glory, gray catkins cottony with droplets of water. A small cloud forms in the meadow behind the barn and drifts up toward the ridge.
Mackerel sky like a wrinkled brow. The spring is still singing about the last rain. The phoebe who called at sunrise flicks his tail.
Brick-red clouds barely move as a relentless wind rummages through the trees and shrubs on the ridgeside. A thin slice of moon gets lost among tossing limbs.
A fur of hoarfrost that lingers long after the daily woodpecker drum circle has broken up. A raven croaks in answer to a crow, under a hospital-white sky.
Cool and nearly clear, save for a couple scraps of cloud to catch the sunrise and color up like old leaves. The distant fluting of geese is just audible over the whine of Monday morning traffic.
A white sky except where the sun blazes, whiter than white. A helicopter’s loud, bladed flower. In its wake, the scattered cries of geese.
The clouds begin to fray, letting the sun through. It’s cold again. A small piece of sandstone sits on the end of my porch like a message, I’m not sure from whom.
Which will last longest: the snow banks piled up by the plow or by the wind? It’s almost below freezing again, with shifting patches of light and dark overhead like a deck of cards being shuffled.
Misty and gray, with endless commentary from crows. The sun appears for half a minute without coming fully out, as pileated woodpeckers cackle in the yard.
Overcast with bright patches among the gray. The thaw continues, as if it might be early spring. The bird app hallucinates a red-winged blackbird.
A gray sky gravid with rain. A gray squirrel pops out of a hole in the yard, walnut between its teeth. Up in the woods, a chipmunk zips across the snow.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
Thaw. The snowpack has shrunk by about half, and the snowplowed banks that flank the road have opened their dark dirt hearts. The gray sky turns faintly pink as the wind picks up.