The usual bird calls—cardinal, titmouse, red-bellied woodpecker—but something seems off. It’s the clouds, coming from the wrong direction.
clouds
February 15, 2017
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.
February 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.
January 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.
January 22, 2017
The clouds that settled in yesterday haven’t lifted, their slow drift barely perceptible through the shifting clarity of the trees.
January 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.
January 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.
January 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.
December 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.
December 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.
December 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.
December 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.
December 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.
December 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.