A dusting of snow that fell while I was taking a shower has vanished again. Fast-moving clouds. On the wind, a train horn’s skewed chord.
clouds
2/5/2017
Under low, gray clouds, the sound of traffic from the valley. A titmouse at the woods’ edge keeps whistling his one, querulous note.
1/30/2017
Every cloud brings a scatter of snow. I gaze at the sun’s bright smudge, remembering a 38,000-year-old depiction of a cow stippled in stone.
1/22/2017
The clouds that settled in yesterday haven’t lifted, their slow drift barely perceptible through the shifting clarity of the trees.
1/19/2017
An echoey call of a Carolina wren sounding like an old-fashioned telephone. The yellow spot in the clouds that marks the sun slides shut.
1/10/2017
Two inches of dry snow have just fallen and the sky is still full of vague menace, like that space on a tax form intentionally left blank.
1/9/2017
White sky. The sun is a bright spot like the eye of a blind cave salamander. Doves flutter up from the cattails on piccolo wings.
12/21/2016
As the clouds thin, the flat-white ground acquires a gloss. Trees grow tenuous shadows, improbably long and skinny on this shortest of days.
12/14/2016
Low sun on the western ridge where new-fallen snow still clings to the trees: that startling white against a blue-black bruise of clouds.
12/10/2016
The sun is a bright nipple in milk-white clouds. On the ground, a new, thin fur—what deer hunters like to call a good tracking snow.
12/6/2016
A hawk glides north along the ridge, a dark eyebrow sliding over the gray sky. Behind and below my chair, something is gnawing at the house.
12/5/2016
A curtain of drips from the season’s first, thin snowfall. The sun comes out from behind a club—an autocorrected cloud with a dark history.
12/4/2016
A distant gunshot. A crow. The rumble of a freight train. On a gray day without shadows, any dark thing reminds us of the sun.
12/2/2016
Cold and overcast with a lighter gray patch where the sun might be. The nasal calls of a nuthatch. A distant mob of crows.