A dark morning, with grim news awaiting me in my email. A fox squirrel crosses the snowy yard, the mellow flame of its tail floating behind.
December 21, 2010
Solstice sunrise turns the western ridge red as an altar. A brown creeper fishes in all the dark valleys of the walnut tree’s bark.
December 20, 2010
A flurry reveals the secret weavings of the wind, spreads a shroud over the porch, and litters my propped-up legs with cryptic asterisks.
December 19, 2010
The cattails’ broken blades are white with rime. Two juncos flutter up under the springhouse eaves, investigating the empty phoebe nest.
December 18, 2010
A dark bulk approaches through the dawn woods: upright, bipedal, enormous feet crunching through crusted snow. My brother, back from owling.
December 17, 2010
Dawn. The soft calls and dark moving forms of sparrows seem covert, even illicit, until the Carolina wren’s alarm clock chatters to life.
December 16, 2010
I pause at the door, coffee in hand: six juncos decorate the dead cherry, fat, motionless. A pileated woodpecker cackles at the wood’s edge.
December 15, 2010
I don seven layers of clothing to sunbathe on the porch. My chair has slid to the northeast end, its back to the prevailing wind.
December 14, 2010
An impossible butterfly dances past the porch: a shred of oak leaf. The trees creak and groan in the bitter-cold wind.
December 13, 2010
With winter’s gift of unimpeded sight and a white backdrop, I watch crows hop and circle a dark carcass 100 yards off through the woods.
December 12, 2010
Freezing rain and fog. Snowbirds crowd the melted tire tracks in the gravel driveway, filling their gizzards wth grit while they can.
December 11, 2010
The boom of a rifle. A small hawk glides through the trees, lands between me and the faint yellow blotch of sun and waggles its tail.
December 10, 2010
Emily Dickinson’s 180th birthday. The sky’s flat whiteness matches the ground: the blank of a page, of self-erasure, of astonishment.
December 9, 2010
Cold, and an iron wind. Two murders of crows rage at each other from the crowns of adjacent oaks, the sunrise slippery on their napes.