Thin cloud, yet the sun’s still strong enough for leaf-glimmer and the shimmer of spider-silk strands already stringing tree to tree. A gray squirrel chases a red squirrel past my feet.
clouds
Sun through thin clouds on an unseasonably warm morning. A carpenter bee inspects my aging porch. Next to the old broken dog statue in my yard, the white narcissus is in bloom.
Under gray skies, the leaf buds of tulip trees are splitting open: green fuzz against the clouds. A cowbird’s liquid note.
Quiet and cool at mid-morning. A cloud appears in the east only to disintegrate. Towhees call from several directions as I finish my tea.
Downy, hairy, red-bellied and pileated: all the woodpeckers for miles around are suddenly drumming, one after another, as the scattered clouds turn orange on a crisp, nearly frosty morning.
The forsythia is fully in bloom, inconguous yellow against the brown woods—not unlike this apparition of a sun burning a hole through the gray clouds. Kinglets flit through the birches. The mourning dove falls silent.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.
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.