A slight sheen on the leaves at sunrise—what passes for rain these days must’ve fallen. The faintest smell of soil. An ovenbird’s endless lesson.
2023
June 8, 2023
Peony leaves shriveling from drought even as their antique, cream-white heads still bloom. Ashen skies. A Cooper’s hawk skims the treetops without setting off a single squirrel.
June 7, 2023
Clear—or what passes for it these days—and cold. The black digger wasp I last saw at dusk hasn’t moved from her spot on the porch column.
June 6, 2023
A bleary, bloodshot sun in an ash-white sky. Pileated woodpeckers foraging just inside the woods’ edge cackle like sacred clowns.
June 5, 2023
Cool with thin clouds. Two wood thrushes fly into the woods, dead grass trailing from the leader’s beak. A chipmunk runs under my chair.
June 4, 2023
Raininess without rain. The peonies remain unbowed. Half-grown bracken fronds in my thin-soiled yard are already turning yellow.
June 2, 2023
Fire sirens wailing through the gap. A hummingbird comes to the spray from my garden hose, his gorget redder than any flower.
June 1, 2023
The appeal of a cool, clear morning is beginning to wear as thin as the splay of browning daffodil leaves below the porch. I lapse into fantasies of fog and rain.
May 31, 2023
Today instead of the usual quickie here I wrote a proper Morning Porch poem over at the ol’ Via. Bon appetit.
May 30, 2023
Cloudless and cool. Craneflies drift through shafts of sun like angels with spider legs, as the afterimages from a night of terrifying dreams fade from view.
May 29, 2023
Memorial Day. The dame’s-rocket lining the driveway is at its height of purple. A hen turkey at the woods’ edge clucks and calls. Summer’s here.
May 28, 2023
Filmy-winged insects drift through rays of sun. A wood thrush comes out into the meadow, hopping like a robin along the edge of the drive.
May 27, 2023
Another clear, cold morning with little dew. Goldfinches gad about in the tops of the locusts, seemingly oblivious to other birds’ territorial obsessions.
May 26, 2023
Cold and clear 40 minutes before sunrise. A shadow flutters in beside the porch and begins to shriek: whippoorwill. When he finally stops, the meadow is alive with twittering.