In the rising sun’s slow shadow-play projected onto the snow, sleeping trees drift on a sea of glitter. A visitation of wings.
snow
Patches of blue sky at sunrise. A red-tailed hawk sits in a high oak limb, pale breast half-camouflaged against the snow that fell in the night.
A filigreed fretwork of wet snow clinging to everything. From the valley, the wail of sirens. The cloud cover thins to a kind of brightness.
Unseasonably warm and very quiet. Sunrise appears through a rift in the clouds: gold in the east, black in the west. The last five piles of icy snow look as out of place as alien spacecrafts.
Just past sunrise the sky almost clears, then clouds over again. The thermometer’s black arrow points straight at 32. The mound of plowed slow at the edge of the yard looks lost and abandoned, like Lot’s wife after she glanced back.
Day slips in among torrents of rain. The woods are mangy with scattered patches of old snow. The gurgle of a wren.
Fog on snow. The hidden full moon’s false dawn obscures the real one. Distant traffic is drowned out by the sound of rushing water.
Fog blurs the difference between the white below and above, the trees reduced to gray wraiths as a Carolina wren sings for the break of day.
Damp and cold. Snowmelt drips from the roof. A blue jay makes a half-hearted hawk-scream and fall silent.
As below, so above, the trees marooned in a flat whiteness no less absolute than that of a blank page, albeit one navigated by squirrels.
First light. White lines crisscross the dark edge of the woods: snow on trees. I stick my hand out to feel it falling, flakes as fine as dust melting into my palm.
Snow falling at dawn—fine flakes at first, then larger and faster as the darkness subsides, as if they’re emissaries for the day. A chickadee sings his wistful, two-note song.
Snow at first light—a silent mob of moving shadows, pecks on my cheek—then as dawn approaches, the slow differentiation of black and swirling white.
After a night of snow and rain, trees rock and clatter under orange clouds. The roof drips. Scattered flakes swirl past.