Thursday June 05, 2008

A hummingbird lands on the upturned tip of a dead elm branch; the branch doesn’t move a hair. The first open peony lies on its side.

On this date

Seven cardinals—three pairs and a lone male—take turns drinking from the stream, then perch in the lilac's bare branches, four feet apart. …

Clear and cold. As the sun climbs higher, the blue deepens. Yesterday's thin snow clings to the porch floorboards when I try to sweep. …

Gloomy, but the birds seem excited, perhaps sensing an approaching storm. A titmouse fleeing a fight lands on a maple limb red with fungus. …

Mid-morning and the trees are starting to shed their latest coat of snow. A pileated woodpecker, too, comes loose, and flaps off cackling. …

Fog heightens the intrigue of January's gray-squirrel soap opera: the slow-motion chases, the tree-top fights, the ruses to elude stalkers. …

A cold, gray morning. Up in the woods, a chickadee's two-note song prompts a cardinal to join in. The sun's hiding place begins to glow. …

The sun fades from blaze to smolder to smear. I notice a bent-down cherry limb that looks like a dancer—something I won't be able to un-see. …

A line of tracks from under the porch to the creek and back look like the prints a very small man walking on his hands would make: raccoon. …

Cold rain drips in the pre-dawn darkness. The wail of a locomotive sounds frighteningly close and full of an obscure, mechanical longing. …

A titmouse lands in the cherry, the streak in his breast the same rust as a tree sparrow's cap, a broomsedge stem, these icicles at sunrise. …

Fog. A distant chainsaw in one direction and in the other, rodent teeth. Amorous squirrels race back and forth over the white ground. …

Sparrow tracks in the thin snow under my chair: I see dandelion seeds on the wind. The house shivers all over when the furnace kicks on. …

Gray sky with streaks of blonde. A house finch turning its squeaky wheel goes all up and down the scale—a tangle of notes. …

The Morning Porch