Tuesday January 14, 2014

Dave Bonta January 14, 2014

At the woods’ edge, a jumble of bone-white sticks: spicebush branches debarked by rabbits. A gray blur where a titmouse grooms in the lilac.

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Warmish and almost sunny, with mist between the trees. The chickadees and wrens are denouncing something hidden in the small hollow maple. …

Snow! Five inches of dry powder, and a light breeze sweeping it from the treetops: gauzy, luminous curls like falling smoke. …

Low sun on the western ridge where new-fallen snow still clings to the trees: that startling white against a blue-black bruise of clouds. …

An oak up in the woods drops a top limb just as I am looking. The sky is gray and gravid with rain. The limb goes head-first like any diver. …

The steady, insidious business of snow. A chickadee lands on a small branch and samples its line of white powder. …

A low drone of traffic from over the ridge. Half-blinded by the sun, I see the backlit wings of small birds as sudden flowers opening. …

White above, gray below—the reverse of the juncos foraging in the ditch among sedges, tear-thumb and asters, calling in small hard notes. …

An impossible butterfly dances past the porch: a shred of oak leaf. The trees creak and groan in the bitter-cold wind. …

A couple degrees above freezing. The snowpack has softened, and the squirrels chasing back and forth through the laurel hardly make a sound. …

Mid-morning, and the snow on the roof has sprouted tendrils of ice reaching for the ground. They drip; they sway in the breeze; they let go. …

Riddle me this: no snow fell here, but the ground is white. The trees with their thin coats of ice creak and clatter in the darkness. …

The Morning Porch/Patio