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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A slow, rhythmless dripping from the top roof. The oak leaves scattered across the snow have only melted themselves the shallowest of pits. …

Cold rain thickens into a downpour. A Cooper's hawk lands in the top of a tall locust and sits preening and shaking, as if taking a shower. …

The hollow echoes with the roar of traffic. Odd how the sun can rise through the trees in total silence, turning a heavy frost into mist. …

Cold and gray. Two doves sit motionless in a tall locust. A pileated woodpecker skulks through the woods, silent save for its wingbeats. …

Yesterday the wet ground glowed in subtle, late-autumn colors; now it's blank white. Frost on the storm door—a map drawn with knives. …

Shreds of clouds disintegrate as they drift toward the east. Sun on wind-tossed mountain laurel leaves—the whole hillside shimmers. …

A heavy frost whitens tree branches fifteen feet off the ground. It's so quiet, I can hear people talking a quarter mile away. …

Just two degrees below freezing, yet somehow things are sharper, crisper, the crow's wings like blades against the blue, its shout a shot. …

Somewhere above the clouds, a military jet heads north: a gray sound on a gray day. In the newly bare lilac, yellow wires of bindweed. …

A red-bellied woodpecker's head going up and down at the top of a tall locust, squeaking like a red marker on the whiteboard sky. …

A three-point buck emerges from the woods, hooves crunching through the icy seep, the sky pink behind him and ahead, the blood-red hill. …

Puffs of white smoke where squirrels forage in snow-covered birches. One squirrel falls twenty feet to the ground and lands with a soft FLUMP. …

The Morning Porch/Patio