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.
clouds
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.
Cold and overcast with a lighter gray patch where the sun might be. The nasal calls of a nuthatch. A distant mob of crows.
The sky keeps clouding over and clearing, like a person who can’t make up their mind. High winds roar in the ridgetop trees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A wash of cirrus below the moon’s inverted bowl. A northern pearly-eye butterfly perches on the porch, bullseyes shining on its underwings.
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.
Through thinning clouds, the mid-morning sun’s dull glow. Below in the woods, leaves and branches beaded with moisture begin to glisten.