Sunday October 20, 2013

Dave Bonta October 20, 2013

Sunny and cold. The soft whistles of white-throated sparrows are slowly subsumed by the hundred voices of an approaching bulldozer.

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It's been 20 years since the butternut tree fell over, but I still miss it: the sky too big, too blank, the nuthatch's call too far away. …

The corpse of a bee hangs six feet above the garden, swaddled in webbing. Inside its fence, the amelanchier sprout is starting to redden. …

A turkey vulture glides low over the trees, circles once to gain altitude, setting off a jay and a squirrel, and soars off down the ridge. …

Sunrise stains the treetops. The woods are full of anxious-sounding calls: chipmunks, jays, nuthatches, an endlessly scolding squirrel... …

Droplets of fog, back-lit by the sun, stream upward into the blue like reverse rain. At the woods' edge, a migrant phoebe clears its throat. …

Cold at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker hitches up the trunk of tall locust, pausing to yell when he reaches the sunlit crown. …

The first small holes through to the ridge-top sky have appeared in the green wall opposite my porch. The sound of falling acorns. …

Watching night turn to day—a thing that should be gradual, but instead proceeds by small leaps of realization: "It's lighter now!" Rain. …

Birdcalls are distant, intermittent. I'm reading about Auschwitz and thinking, it's vital to learn the names. Someday it may be all we have. …

I sit admiring the stillness and symmetry of a brown moth on the freshly painted white rafters—a moth that turns out to be, alas, a leaf. …

Where daffodils bloomed in April, goldenrod sways—a more worldly yellow. The distant hurricane makes a roosting monarch flap its wings. …

The Morning Porch/Patio