An ashen sky, gravid with snow. The field sparrow’s back: that song that sounds like rising excitement (or alarm, depending on one’s mood).
clouds
Faint traces of high cloud give a seaside sort of light. I dreamed the wood frogs were calling, but it’s still too cold.
A raven croaks and I see the sun moving backwards—just a sun-sized pit in the clouds glowing as it passes the location of the actual sun.
It has stopped raining. The squirrel with pale fur forages at the edge of a small, marooned cloud. The sky brightens and releases more rain.
The sun burns through high clouds. A gleam in the stream from a clump of sedge where spray has made an ice-fingered claw open to the sky.
A soft, cloud-filtered sunlight makes the white hillside glow rather than gleam. The rime-lined creek is still loud from yesterday’s thaw.
Two clouds cross, a high one going north and a low one going south—a sight so odd it feels like an omen, until the song sparrow sings.
The monotonous chant of a tufted titmouse. Clouds move in and seed the wind with small, round snowflakes, giving it another way to bite.
The cloud ceiling—as meteorologists call it—grows thin, judging by the sun’s intensifying glow. Agitated song sparrows chirp back and forth.
Winter’s back. You can see it in the dash of snow and thick crust of clouds, hear it in the train’s horn and the querulous cries of crows.
Low, gray clouds, and the ground half-brown after a day and night of melting. Over the rumble of my furnace I hear a screech owl trilling.
Mackerel clouds above then across the sun like a face consumed by worry lines. The caws of a crow echo off the thawed and refrozen hillside.
Another frigid morning. Clouds thin and wispy as frayed silk drift off, and the trees’ long shadows turn sharper and darker blue.
Steady snow from clouds thin enough for the sun to glimmer though. My pants legs are flecked with flakes small and round as grains of salt.