White sky slowly disappearing the sun like a pregnant rabbit reabsorbing her litter. Cedar waxwings come whistling down to the stream to drink.
clouds
Looking through a series of thin screens: swirling snowflakes, greening lilac, yellow forsythia, bare trees, holey clouds.
Thrasher thrasher says the thrasher. Rising sun a bright smear in the clouds. A winter wren’s boneless ode to joy.
The sun eases out of the clouds. A gnatcatcher is flying sorties from atop the lilac, which has just burst its buds.
Clouds that looked dark before sunrise are mottled with blue-gray and yellow. Woodpecker blast beats. Wrenish riffs.
Five degrees below freezing and heavily overcast. A thin, lispy note—some finch, I guess, high in the black locusts. The dry hiss of sleet.
Heavy clouds except where the sun glimmers through. Snowflakes. The robin’s bright warble.
Brightness fated to be brief: already, gray-bottomed cumulus clouds are sailing in like galleons, dividing the blue between them.
Under a uniformly gray sky the same titmouse has been singing the same monotonous notes, I realize, for the past 45 minutes.
Weak sun through thickening clouds. A robin and his echo. The metallic taps of a titmouse opening a sunflower seed against a drainpipe.
Humid and cool. The sun keeps finding new holes in the clouds. The woodpeckers keep drumming.
10F/-12C but the wind has mostly died. The plastic flamingo leans only slightly askew in the snowy garden. Patches of blue converge overhead.
Clear everywhere except where the sun rises pink, orange and yellow, heralded by small woodpeckers with loud, locust-wood drums.
A leaden sky at sunrise, but an hour later, the sun glimmers through thinning clouds. Cardinal and titmouse song. The smell of bare dirt.