Trees rock and sway. The dead elm has parted with its largest limb, and the oblong scar glows a creamy yellow, like a well-aged cheese.
Dave Bonta
Cold, gray morning. I inventory the remaining spots of green: moss, grass, mountain laurel, pine, a rosette of thistle outlined in frost.
A small band of clear sky in the west, persisting for over an hour, gives the woods and meadow a feverish glow. The sound of the wind.
The opening day of rifle season. Deer run back and forth through the laurel—each shift of the wind must bring a different human’s stink.
Soft-focus shadows from the high, thin clouds. Chickadees are calling chirree-chirrup, a car door slams, a crow goes yelling into the sun.
The female cardinal—a being guaranteed to unsettle conservative Catholics—answers her mate’s anxious chirps, crest bent back by the wind.
A tulip poplar key helicopters past the porch, shook loose by a squirrel at the edge of the woods rummaging among the spikey cups of seeds.
As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl.
Damp and overcast, but every bird on the mountain seems to be passing through my yard, wings flashing like old coins, like wooden nickels.
Rain and fog with raven: silent, just above the treetops. White-throated sparrows and a freight train whistling at the same pitch.
Gray morning with raven: that gutteral, wild cry so inadequately rendered in birders’ onomatopoeia as Bonk, bonk.
The still, gray morning is interrupted by the stuttering roar of a pickup full of hunters hauling an enormous homemade wooden tree stand.
A half-grown barn cat crawls out from under the house, gray and bedraggled as a clump of drier lint. One jay rasping at the top of a locust.
Cold and quiet, except for the sound of incisors chiseling a bone-hard walnut and the wind hissing through scattered marcescent leaves.