Overcast at sunrise. The woodpeckers’ percussive breakfasts. A mosquito wanders over my propped-up feet.
clouds
July 1, 2022
I watch a new squirrel figure out the tree-to-tree route out of the woods, backtracking, sizing things up. The sun goes in.
June 26, 2022
The sun behind a nearly motionless cloud casts a pair of crepuscular rays like vast, dark wings. A hen turkey stalks into the woods.
June 20, 2022
A deer grazes a few feet away; I can hear blades of grass tearing. The sun almost breaks through a thin spot in the clouds.
June 18, 2022
Windy and cool. The pale undersides of leaves turning in unison like shoals of fish. A robin and a tanager trading off.
June 12, 2022
When the clouds move off, an orbweaver’s web appears in the corner of a porch balustrade, shimmering as it pulses in the breeze.
June 9, 2022
Just past sunrise, a clearing wind. I look up from the Eastern Europe of my book to flame-bellied clouds, the forest all astir.
May 29, 2022
A planetary conjunction slowly infiltrated by cirrus stained the color of dawn. A barred owl calls and a wild turkey answers.
May 24, 2022
Heavily overcast and cool. The black cherry trees at the woods’ edge point the fingers of their inflorescences in every direction but down.
April 29, 2022
Sun through a thin milk of clouds. A lull in birdsong, punctuated by a didactic ovenbird and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s brilliant warble.
April 27, 2022
Cloudy and cold. One of the local redtails is hunting along the woods’ edge, flying from branch to branch, head swiveling all about.
April 25, 2022
Sunlight softened by high-altitude haze. The hermit thrush is still around, dreamily singing up on the ridge, ignoring the boorish wren.
April 21, 2022
Heavily overcast. The patchy yellow of a goldfinch and the spicebush he sits in, grooming his breast feathers.
April 18, 2022
White sky slowly disappearing the sun like a pregnant rabbit reabsorbing her litter. Cedar waxwings come whistling down to the stream to drink.