The wind rustles in the crown of one red oak; all the others are still. A train whistle. The light patches in the clouds fade to blue.
Dave Bonta
Rain and fog. A squirrel strips water from its head with a lightning-quick motion of its front paws. The dark dead eyestalks of the tansy.
White bars of frost where shadows span the yard. I listen to the roar of the nearby quarry, outpost of a Republican money machine.
Five below zero Celcius at sunrise. A single kinglet flutters in the birch—its whispery chirps. The fourth-quarter moon’s thin grin.
The yard is alive with robins foraging, chasing, tut-tutting, rust-orange breasts the color of the oaks, all aglow in the mid-morning sun.
Below the porch, a dot of pink: a very late dame’s-rocket blooming the day after a hard frost. A brown creeper inspects a small walnut tree.
Now that summer’s past, the cardinal has gone back to harassing her reflection. The frost-whitened myrtle bed. A barberry turned to flame.
Halfway up the dead cherry beside the porch, a gray squirrel stops and stares, and I recall reading that squirrels are omnivorous as rats.
Sun blazes through a newly open woods, glossy on the backs of wild turkeys: nine hens and two jakes, who keep pausing to fan their tails.
An hour before dawn, a high thin cloud drifts northeast to the rumble of a freight train. When the half-moon intersects, a rainbow disc.
When the fog lifts, a flock of chickadees moves in, foraging in the mid-canopy, precipitating a shower of birch and locust leaves.
Just past daybreak, a pileated woodpecker whinnies, a nuthatch tuts, a crow croaks, and a gray squirrel clatters through gray branches.
All along the ridgetop now the sky is visible, cathedral-sized windows between the trees. The throaty roar of the neighbor’s pickup truck.
Mid-morning: the first patch of blue, little larger than a moon. In the old lilac below the other house, a Carolina wren bursts into song.