The morning starts out gray, dull as a stone in the driveway. “The stone is a mirror which works poorly,” Charles Simic once wrote. But mirrors of any kind bore me. They always give the same answer.
The structure of the wood must influence how the bark beetles excavate their galleries, I think. Is this the tree’s calligraphy, or the insect’s? I pore over my images with the intensity of a Medieval monk.
The sky starts to clear. Icicles formed by a waterfall’s spray dangle trumpet-shaped toes above the current.
A swayback mare and her foal graze at the edge of a snowy pasture. The rusty trailer, too, was once a blank white.
I spot a ribbon – the kind used to wrap presents – winding through the branches of a ridgetop oak. A balloon must’ve brought it here. The last blue scrap of it almost disappears into the sky.