Two decades of porch-sitting, and I still can’t shake the illusion that my feet are propped on the railing of a ship that never leaves port.
Dave Bonta
Nothing of note this morning, I’m tempted to say. But even the random arrangement of walnut leaf ribs on the red floorboards is beautiful.
For a half-hour after moonset, the sky is perfectly empty, the ground is still white. Then through the bare trees, this blemish of a sun.
A small flock of sparrows scudding above the trees in tight formation is caught by the early sun—daylight saved over from last March.
Peeled flesh of a black walnut leaks pus onto the sidewalk, more indelible than a blood stain. A woodpecker cackles from a bone-white snag.
Rust-colored leaves hiss and rustle under a slate-gray sky. A blue jay struggles to fly with its gullet full of nuts.
The whining scold-calls of squirrels, agitation of chipmunks, denunciation of a crow: soundtrack for a gray morning with one white hawk.
In the pouring rain, a six-point buck rips leaves off a lilac branch that the storm broke down, his antlers the same color as the break.
A yellow barberry bush at the edge of the woods trembles violently: two deer are stripping the fruit from its thorny branches.
Most of the edge and understory trees are bare now, and I can see under the oak canopy clear to the crest of the ridge and the sky beyond.
Two leaf-sized flames circle the trunk of a sunlit oak: pileated woodpeckers. Wings open like a fortuneteller’s deck of cards.
The low clouds are a patchwork of light and dark; the oaks change from brown to burgundy in the space of a minute. A bright curtain of rain.
In the middle of a still morning, a strange enthusiasm suddenly infects the birds, flitting, calling, gleaning, grooming, under a dull sky.
The crown of an oak that was green on Tuesday now glows orange in the sun. Every breeze shakes a fleet of helicopters out of the tulip tree.