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.
clouds
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.
December 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.
December 1, 2016
The sky keeps clouding over and clearing, like a person who can’t make up their mind. High winds roar in the ridgetop trees.
November 27, 2016
The sun half-emerges from the clouds, like a chick too weak to break the shell. A small woman walks up the road, led by a large brown dog.
November 24, 2016
The freezing rain stops by mid-morning, but the low cloud cover persists. From the valley to the east, the sound of semi-automatic gunfire.
November 13, 2016
The only cloud is an unmoving section of contrail that barely melts in the course of an hour, stubborn as a block of ice in all that blue.
October 30, 2016
Gray in the west, yellow in the east, blue overhead. A tiny sharp-shinned hawk lands in a yard tree and only one squirrel bothers to scold.
October 17, 2016
So that mackerel sky at midnight meant rain by dawn. But already the clouds are breaking up and slicks of sun are pooling between the trees.
September 1, 2016
A heavy sky, gravid with rain. In the town a mile and a half way, a fire siren—that hortatory wail. Then the ululations of the trucks.
August 27, 2016
Cool with a scrim of cloud. From high in the canopy, a scarlet tanager’s hoarse song—the first in weeks. A sudden sweet smell I can’t place.
August 24, 2016
A wash of cirrus below the moon’s inverted bowl. A northern pearly-eye butterfly perches on the porch, bullseyes shining on its underwings.
August 7, 2016
Cool and clear. An enormous hairy fly lands on my arm, then my chair. I swat it and it flies off, apparently unhurt. Clouds move in.