Sun in the thinning treetops—a nest of needles. From the other house, the muffled sound of a drill teaching the wall to sing.
sun
A foraging chickadee gives the lilac twigs a thorough grooming. I shut my eyes against the sun and see its white prints all over my retina.
Shutting my eyes alternately against the glare, I discover that the trees’ shadows are only blue in my right eye; they’re gray in my left.
Just as bright as yesterday, but warmer. The snow is difficult to look at. I bite into an apple and a nuthatch scolds me for the noise.
It’s very cold. I’m glad for the sun, which however soon begins to pulse as thin, parallel clouds move in, as regular as waves on a beach.
A new half-inch of snow; I have to brush off my chair before I sit. The sun behind snow clouds is a white blear, a bear, a blinding tooth.
My new glasses have some sort of prismatic coating. I turn my head and see a rainbow-banded sun rising east-northeast among the pines.
I bring no hat brim or sunglasses to my front-porch tete-a-tete with the sun, grateful on such a cold morning for any display of warmth.
I stare bleary-eyed at a chickadee darting through the lilac, listen to dueting wrens. The sun, too, is blurred by a kind of mucous.
While chickadees call, a raven croaks, and snow glitters in the air, the sun steals above the horizon like a Hun, one blade at a time.