Both ridges vanish into fog. A squirrel missing the end of its tail disinters a black walnut from the frozen earth.
fog
White sky and white ground meet in a blur of fog. Above the drumming of rain on the roof, a white-throated sparrow’s minor-key song.
Rain and fog at daybreak. Some intrepid deer hunter fires a single shot. I wonder how dry the squirrels are in their high, ball-shaped dreys.
Clear and still. An hour after the dawn fog lifted, a new, thinner mist appears—fog droplets evaporating off the trees.
Rainy and cold. The distant firing of a semi-automatic rifle, muffled by valley fog, sounds like nothing so much as a crepitating fart.
Out at first light. Venus is visible through the thin fog, slowly fading until I lose it in the already-bare branches of a walnut tree.
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
The almost Kabbalistic way a few syllables of thunder have birthed a whole lexicon of torrent. Fog takes a heavy eraser to the trees.
In the fog and mizzle, swelling yellow-green lilac buds are the brightest thing. A single jet goes over in all the time I sit outside.
Thick fog: soundproofing against all but the closest chirps. A nuthatch descends a locust trunk, does an about-face, and scuttles back up.
Fog. Trees reduced to their most elemental architecture: an outline, a few brush strokes, nothing. Antagonists to an invisible woodpecker.
Light rain. Fog forms up on the ridge and drifts down through the trees like a ghost army, loud with the sounds of traffic.
Rain and fog. Gray-green lichen glows on tree trunks in the woods and on every twisted branch of the old crabapple beside the springhouse.
Two degrees below freezing, but the rain remains rain. Somewhere above the fog, an airplane’s single propeller.