A small plane with a loud motor is the only thing in the sky besides the sun. In its wake, the distant cooing of a dove. I notice that the dead heads now outnumber the living in my iris patch.
plane
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.
Sunrise from under a lid of cloud turning the ridge orange. The robin sings a few bars. A propellor plane fades into the distance.
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with 97% humidity and very little noise from—I’m guessing—valleys full of fog. A single-engine plane fades into the distance.
Clear and cold, the ground gray with frost. Sunrise reddens the western ridge. A propeller plane fades into the distance.
Clear and cold at the crack of dawn. A propeller plane comes blinking out of the east, banks and follows the mountain south, engine fading into a quiet trickle from the spring.
My first day on earth without a father. It takes me ten minutes to notice the sky—cloudless blue. The laboring engine of a distant plane.
The least gloomy morning in more than a week—and also the coldest. A single-prop plane goes in and out of sunlight, trailed by its sound.
Two degrees below freezing, but the rain remains rain. Somewhere above the fog, an airplane’s single propeller.
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
Frost on the bent-down blades of cattails. Two single-prop planes from different directions—their drones blending then separating again.
Three propeller planes in half an hour, noisy as airborne lawnmowers. It’s peak haiku time, but I could disappear into a novel.
The drone of a single-prop plane, hidden like the horizon by trees. A mourning dove calls. The sun slowly submerges in a mud bath of clouds.
Quiet except for a distant plane. A pair of squirrels race nose-to-tail through the yard, slowing only when they clamber through the lilac.