The sun shines through gauzy clouds, giving the morning a faded-photo effect. A squirrel drinks from the stream. A cowbird’s liquid note.
clouds
At mid-morning, a low, heavy cloud ceiling that muffles sound. The first snowflakes wander in, accompanied by a song sparrow’s jaunty tune.
Blank white sky. The woods are quiet except for an occasional chickadee. From over at the neighbors’, the labored putting of an old engine.
Cloud cover thin as muslin sheet; the woods are anything but gloomy. A small brown moth flutters purposefully past. The neighbor’s chainsaw.
A thin spot in the clouds passing over the sun gives the tulip tree at the woods’ edge an aureole for its suddenly dramatic, upraised limbs.
A pool of light among the shadows of the yard: morning sun reflected from an upstairs window. Mare’s tails drift overhead. A phoebe calls.
Cool and clear, the grass bent low by dew. At 10:00, the neighbor’s rooster begins to crow, and I look up to see a few unexpected clouds.
Gray sky in which the sun slowly surfaces like a carp in a murky pond. Rain-slick leaves glisten. A great spangled fritillary zigzags past.
Weak sunlight: a milkiness in the sky like the film that forms over the eyes of the dead. A lone fawn runs bleating through the forest.
Despite the constant agitation of the tulip tree’s thin-stemmed leaves, its eponymous sex organs barely move—golden cups open to the clouds.
It’s just above freezing, bright sun alternating with clouds. The usual bird calls seem to have an almost interrogatory tone.
Clouds gather and, over the course of an hour, disappear again. A small red spider rappels down from my glasses onto the red porch floor.
Fast moving cumulus clouds. When the sun comes out, it glistens on the mountain laurel leaves in the woods and in the yard, the periwinkle.
Cold with low rain clouds at dawn. Over the noise from I-99, the nasal mating calls of that shoreless shorebird, the American woodcock.