Heavily overcast and cool. The black cherry trees at the woods’ edge point the fingers of their inflorescences in every direction but down.
clouds
Sun through a thin milk of clouds. A lull in birdsong, punctuated by a didactic ovenbird and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s brilliant warble.
Cloudy and cold. One of the local redtails is hunting along the woods’ edge, flying from branch to branch, head swiveling all about.
Sunlight softened by high-altitude haze. The hermit thrush is still around, dreamily singing up on the ridge, ignoring the boorish wren.
Heavily overcast. The patchy yellow of a goldfinch and the spicebush he sits in, grooming his breast feathers.
White sky slowly disappearing the sun like a pregnant rabbit reabsorbing her litter. Cedar waxwings come whistling down to the stream to drink.
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.