Monday March 03, 2014

Dave Bonta March 3, 2014

Fresh from drinking out of the cold stream, a chickadee swipes its bill rapidly against a twig, then goes to join the others in the birches.

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Last night's snow clings to yesterday's ice: trees as confectionery. The call and response of Carolina wrens—her brusque two notes. …

Thick fog, returning to the forest its foreignness—the sense that any sound could be a footfall, that the rain is a many-legged beast. …

Heavy frost. When the sun strikes it, a faint mist rises from the yard. My father stops the car in the road to say he's just seen a mink. …

‪Cold and overcast with a lighter gray patch where the sun might be. The nasal calls of a nuthatch. A distant mob of crows. ‬ …

A few lost snowflakes floating this way and that. A hunter walks up the road, his safety-orange vest printed with the shapes of leaves. …

A dark heap on the snow where a squirrel husked a walnut. Two gunshots in quick succession. Soon the mountain will be dotted with gut piles. …

The blear isn't just in my eyes; the distance dissolves into a thin mist which the weak sun can't burn off. A train's dispassionate wail. …

Cold at sunrise. A squirrel gathers clumps of dry leaves from the last oak to still have them and stuffs them into the top of a hollow snag. …

A blaze-orange hunting coat floats through the snowy woods, out-of-place as a sign in the desert: burning bush, billboard, neon whorehouse. …

Cold, gray morning. I inventory the remaining spots of green: moss, grass, mountain laurel, pine, a rosette of thistle outlined in frost. …

It doesn't take a hard wind to get the trees talking, merely the right wind. A nuthatch's nasal commentary. The whistling of doves' wings. …

Quiet except for the distant moan of a truck's brakes and the staticky sound of sleet, giving way to a heavier ordnance of freezing rain. …

The Morning Porch/Patio