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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The wind sounds even colder hissing through the leaves that still cling to an oak at the woods' edge. I pull down my cap against the sun. …

Scattered chickadee calls coalesce into a heated argument. The sun emerges for half a minute through a vulva-shaped opening in the clouds. …

The morning after the end of deer season and an inch and a half of new snow covers the evidence—the gut piles, the trails of blood and hair. …

Snow blowing sideways. A minute after I sweep it, the porch floor is white again. The blaze-orange vests of two hunters leaving the woods. …

Hollow thumps where a rabbit dashes across the slick snow-crust, alarmed, perhaps, by the sun's blinding path through the trees. …

A chickadee in the walnut tree flits from twig to twig, swiping its bill twice against each, then drops into the creek for a quick drink. …

Clear and still. In the corner of what used to a lawn across from the springhouse, the limbs of a fallen tree shine white with frost. …

The boom of a rifle. A small hawk glides through the trees, lands between me and the faint yellow blotch of sun and waggles its tail. …

Trees pop in the cold, creak in the wind. Sunrise spreads across the sky like a grease stain. All the foxtail millet is bowed to the north. …

Rain. The snow's almost gone, but the forest floor has been altered: no longer scruffy and mammalian, but sleek as a red-backed salamander. …

Another cold and misty morning. The last of the snow is gone from the hillside. Pressed flat, the leaf litter still glows faintly red. …

The Morning Porch/Patio