Saturday March 28, 2015

Dave Bonta March 28, 2015

A dusting of snow. Three song sparrows are trying to out-sing each other, and the tall black locust at the woods’ edge creaks with ice.

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Her shadow draws my eye to the pileated woodpecker flying as silently as a pickpocket's hand from one trunk to the next. A flash of crimson. …

Sunny and cold. A titmouse call takes me back to that time one nested outside my window and woke me each morning like an elfin rooster. …

Another wintry morning, and I'm marveling at the sharpness of the air in my lungs, the sun in my face, the blue sky, the cardinal's song. …

A downy woodpecker in the spicebush hangs from a silk moth cocoon, trying to reach the pupa, but the soft stuff defeats her hammer and nail. …

A yellow smear of sun on the white-bread sky. The distant knocks of a pileated woodpecker seeking admittance to frozen galleries of ants. …

It's cold and gray, but a chipmunk has emerged from hibernation and sits on a log protruding above the snow without moving for half an hour. …

Juncos rearrange themselves in the lilac—the scrabble of their feet. If nothing else, this winter has brought great stretches of silence. …

A lone junco forages in the driveway. (Sick? A pariah?) The labored flaps of a pileated woodpecker coming in low over the yard. …

Overcast and quiet. The remaining snowbanks like beached white whales dampen the leaves around them with their slow collapse. …

Dawn. The Cooper's hawk is back, his kak-kak-kak echoing off the icy snow. I scan the trees, a haystack of branches, for that fierce needle. …

A downy woodpecker plays a dead locust limb like a marimba, moving rapidly from pitch to pitch, a tremor of red against the blue sky. …

A sky of shifting gray. This is basement-flooding weather. I crack out the harmonica, hoping that no one will hear it above the creek. …

The Morning Porch