It’s very cold. I’m glad for the sun, which however soon begins to pulse as thin, parallel clouds move in, as regular as waves on a beach.
clouds
A lighter band of clouds above the horizon. Half-way up the brown hillside, a flock of winter birds—flashes of white from their wings.
As daylight gathers, the sky goes from white to gray. A train whistle trailed by its rumble of freight. The distant propellers of a plane.
The sun flickers as thin clouds drift past. In the otherwise still meadow, one bent head of brome grass is swaying.
Weak sunlight from a whitening sky. A flock of juncos comes twittering into the lilac, hopping on and off the old, broken statue of a dog.
Shreds of clouds disintegrate as they drift toward the east. Sun on wind-tossed mountain laurel leaves—the whole hillside shimmers.
Sunrise. I watch the slow drift of contrail graffiti: I, I, I at cross angles, until they merge and disappear into spreading clouds.
Classic November sky, with here a light patch and here a dark—a full palette of grays. Wind riffles the oak leaves, now more brown than red.
Clouds darken. The wind carries the sound of lawnmowers. When the rain starts, it feels like an unresolved chord finally returning home.
Low clouds fly east to west. From above the road, the loud snap of a phoebe’s beak on the spot where some fly had been a moment before.
Soft light filtered by a film of cloud. A squirrel carrying a freshly exhumed walnut bounds under the broken dog statue and into the lilac.
In contrast to the clouds, the snowbank beside the driveway is shrunken and gray, like something left too long at the back of the fridge.
It’s cold. I lie in bed listening to a bluebird. When I emerge onto the porch an hour later, the first blue holes are opening in the clouds.
In the wake of a slow-moving cloud, sunlight spreads through the woods trunk by trunk, branch by branch like a contagion none can escape.