Thursday September 08, 2016

Dave Bonta September 8, 2016

The scattered creaks of red-winged blackbirds off in the woods. A mosquito wanders over my shirt, testing the fabric with her frail drill.

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Under a low cloud ceiling, the thunder of trains and traffic from the valley. The black cat's deadly silence trips a gray-squirrel alarm. …

Now that I can see the quaking aspens, through bare walnut branches, I can hear them too: their constant whisper. Gauzy rain. A train horn. …

Now that the walnut trees are bare I can see the aspens down along the boggy end of the meadow—leaves so quick to quake, so slow to let go. …

The tulip poplar sapling in the yard glows in the sunlight, a golden column. A honeybee buzzes around the empty light socket above my head. …

Warm, with a bleary sun. Three deer file out of the woods: a doe with grown fawns. She pauses to browse the leaves on a feral privet bush. …

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

Two antlerless deer pass the porch ten minutes apart, each grunting anxiously. Gray-brown now, they almost vanish into the dead goldenrod. …

Now that the birch closest to the porch is bare, I notice a large hornets' nest: a ghost town, a wino's abandoned bottle in a paper sack. …

I pick the last few unsplit witch hazel nuts in my garden, hoping I can witness their famed explosions. I line them up on top of my monitor. …

Bright lights appear on a storm-felled locust below my parents' house—reflections from the second-storey windows. A hawk's swift shadow. …

The coldest morning so far this season. Faint noises in the darkness must be leaves letting go, brushing against branches on their way down. …

The Morning Porch