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.
fog
November 30, 2020
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.
November 10, 2020
Clear and still. An hour after the dawn fog lifted, a new, thinner mist appears—fog droplets evaporating off the trees.
October 26, 2020
Rainy and cold. The distant firing of a semi-automatic rifle, muffled by valley fog, sounds like nothing so much as a crepitating fart.
October 21, 2020
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.
September 27, 2020
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
March 29, 2020
The almost Kabbalistic way a few syllables of thunder have birthed a whole lexicon of torrent. Fog takes a heavy eraser to the trees.
March 17, 2020
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.
February 26, 2020
Thick fog: soundproofing against all but the closest chirps. A nuthatch descends a locust trunk, does an about-face, and scuttles back up.
February 6, 2020
Fog. Trees reduced to their most elemental architecture: an outline, a few brush strokes, nothing. Antagonists to an invisible woodpecker.
January 3, 2020
Light rain. Fog forms up on the ridge and drifts down through the trees like a ghost army, loud with the sounds of traffic.
December 14, 2019
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.
December 13, 2019
Two degrees below freezing, but the rain remains rain. Somewhere above the fog, an airplane’s single propeller.
November 18, 2019
The damp silence inside a cloud, broken only by a pileated woodpecker’s muffled tapping and the distant caw of a crow.