Monday March 12, 2018

Dave Bonta March 12, 2018

Cold and gloomy, but the yard seethes with birds: juncos, cardinals, wren. A hundred yards away, a hawk sits on a limb, bedeviled by crows.

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Cold and gray. A downy woodpecker forages in the road, joined by a nuthatch, seemingly curious about this stony alternative to a tree trunk. …

Patches of white in the yard—the first frost. So late! But then the oaks are still green, the sky still constrained by leaves. …

White sky, bright leaves, shivering on the branch as if in ecstasy. The sine wave of a gray squirrel's tail and body bounding up the road. …

The wind persists, and now that the walnut trees are bare I can see the aspens by the marsh, their perpetually agitated crowds yellowing up. …

The wind has made the leaves at the end of the porch draw into a circle. A red-tailed hawk soars over the house, flapping to stay aloft. …

The forest floor glistens: all those fallen leaves not yet stripped of their polish. I picture them crawling with the newly restive ticks. …

Cold, gray, and windy. Old webworm tents freighted with caterpillar corpses flap in the otherwise bare branches of the walnut trees. …

The soft clatter of oak leaves on their way to the ground. Dull thumps as a pileated woodpecker excavates a hole, crest like a flaming axe. …

Cool air, bright sun and silence, save for the rustling of cattails and the creaking of one dead oak cradled in the limbs of its neighbor. …

Just past daybreak, a pileated woodpecker whinnies, a nuthatch tuts, a crow croaks, and a gray squirrel clatters through gray branches. …

Two leaf-sized flames circle the trunk of a sunlit oak: pileated woodpeckers. Wings open like a fortuneteller's deck of cards. …

Rain. The only bright colors now are shades of orange; even the yellow chrysanthemums have turned brown, balled up like soggy caterpillars. …

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