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.
clouds
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.
Sun through cloud—enough to make the leaf duff shine in the woods. A chipmunk rustles. The distant squeal of a misaligned wheel on a train.
Colder, with a brisk wind. The forest has developed a new creak, somewhere in the vicinity of the cloud-shrouded sun. It squeaks. It moans.
Scattered chickadee calls coalesce into a heated argument. The sun emerges for half a minute through a vulva-shaped opening in the clouds.
High clouds move slowly in the wrong direction; the sun goes from blear to smear. Up by the barn, a large agitation of chickadees.
Among the leaves scudding past the porch, a stray snowflake. A blue seam opens in the clouds to the west where a raven is calling.
The train’s horn is full of Monday. Migrating towhees compare notes at the edge of the woods. A blue wound closing in the clouds.
Before dawn, the half moon’s flat edge passing through different types of clouds like a cheese knife. The neighbor’s rooster starts to crow.
Cool and almost clear. A few clouds come scudding from the same direction as the highway noise, as if themselves powered by small engines.
The sun fades as the sky turns paler blue. I close my eyes to listen to the creek—after rain, like a room full of whispered conversations.
The drone of a single-prop plane, hidden like the horizon by trees. A mourning dove calls. The sun slowly submerges in a mud bath of clouds.