From the valley, a wailing duet of fire sirens. Woodpeckers tap and listen, tap and listen, as the soft, light snow goes on falling.
snow
Bright sun, and meltwater drips from the roof despite the cold. I think about microclimates—pits in the snow around dark goldenrod stalks.
Another flash mob of crows—a knot, a clot. (No murder yet.) A sudden snow squall and my dark jeans and coat are studded with stars.
The small hole in the yard that leads to the underground stream has melted open, dark as a blowhole in the skin of a white whale.
Thick fog. A steady drumming of snowmelt on the porch roof. A bluejay in the barberry, out of what looks like sheer boredom, begins to yell.
A gray day loud with traffic. The snowpack has slid half-way off the metal roof over the oil tanks, curling under the eaves like a claw.
A gray morning. I notice, silhouetted against the snow, how all the heads in each patch of wild garlic are bent in the same direction.
The only tracks on the road are mine, and the only clouds are right where the sun is. I hear heavy wingbeats followed by a raven’s croak.
Clear and very cold. The wind has erased all tracks but its own, and the trees’ etiolated shadows rock back and forth like trauma survivors.
The barberry bush, still red with fruit, is heavy with a second crop of snow. From its depths, a white-throated sparrow’s plaintive song.
A wet snow has turned the trees Victorian, every last twig edged with filigree. The only sound from the valley is the rumbling of trains.
White above and below. But looking more closely, I see the tracks of mice forced to leave the house to forage for weed seeds in the garden.
Despite the wind, yesterday’s snow still clings to the trees, like the sleep I keep trying to rub from my eyes. A wren’s ascending rattle.
As the predicted snow begins, my parents’ bird feeders grow loud with chittering. An eddy of wind carries the distant snarl of a chainsaw.