Thursday January 28, 2021

Dave Bonta January 28, 2021

Bitter cold. Clouds hide the sunrise, but the crows still herald it. The squirrels appear to be staying in their nests.

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