Friday October 02, 2009

Dave Bonta October 2, 2009

Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.

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The scrabbling of squirrel claws on black locust bark: someone's in heat. The shadow of a porch column crosses my face: it must be noon. …

Just below freezing; the snow lays here and melts there. A flock of finches in the treetops—punctuation marks in search of a sentence. …

Yesterday's snowfall has been sleeted and rained on, turning the hollow from a soundproofed room into an echo chamber for traffic noise. …

Traffic noise blends with the ridgetop wind to form a single roar. In the thin snow behind my chair, the meandering tracks of a sparrow. …

Trees pop in the cold. I close my eyes against the sun and watch its track fade on my retina: a connect-the-dots drawing gone wrong. …

Quiet and cold at mid-morning. The sole large rhododendron up in the woods keeps gleaming and fading as the sun moves in and out of clouds. …

Gurgle of the stream in my left ear, titmice in my right. The crunch of gravel as my dad's Honda pulls up, silvery blue as new ice. …

Freezing rain and fog. Snowbirds crowd the melted tire tracks in the gravel driveway, filling their gizzards wth grit while they can. …

The wind has died at last and the sun inches through the trees, appearing to chew into each side of a fat trunk as it slides behind it. …

The world's white again: even with the wind, a thin coating of snow sticks to every icy surface. Juncos flit through clattering branches. …

Last night, I watched a meteor blaze across a hole in the white clouds. This morning, a full palette of grays. The local star peeks through. …

The Morning Porch/Patio