Saturday October 09, 2010

Dave Bonta October 9, 2010

Chipmunks cluck—a hillside of leaky faucets. Over by the powerline, a crow is venting what sounds like frustration: a hollow ach ach ach.

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Sunrise: a glimpse of yellow from beneath the lid of clouds. Goldfinches flutter down to drink from the stream's thin fissure of open water. …

A high-pitched train horn. The yammering of a red-bellied woodpecker. Almost imperceptibly, rain begins to tap on the snowpack's icy lid. …

The woods after a rain, when branches have dried but trunks and limbs are still damp: kirei na kanji, as they say in Japan. A clean feeling. …

A small hawk flies through the forest in steady rain, perches in the crown of an oak for several minutes, and flies on. The wind picks up. …

White above and below. But looking more closely, I see the tracks of mice forced to leave the house to forage for weed seeds in the garden. …

The finest of snowflakes—little more than sparkles in the sun—drift down from an almost blue sky. The yard is a maze of deer hoof-prints. …

Clear and very cold. A single squirrel track crosses the yard, the footprints spaced far apart. The windward side of my face turns numb. …

Deer have been eating the wild rosebush again, and the yard is a maze of rabbit tracks. The fog lifts for a minute, then returns. …

In the bitter night, a white-footed mouse bounded unerringly from the corner of the wall to a hole 20 feet away. The snow is my newspaper. …

Cloudless and cold. Listening to the underground stream gurgle through a hole in the yard, I think about my Chinese teacher from long ago. …

A few hours above freezing yesterday, and the snowpack lost its ability to absorb sound. I sit in the dark listening to the roar of trucks. …

At first light, few other sounds than the fluting of doves' wings. I hold my head perfectly still to watch Venus moving through the trees. …

The Morning Porch/Patio