The Morning Porch

January 30, 2009

Dave Bonta January 30, 2009

In the pre-dawn darkness, the wall of trees is in motion, like a silent waterfall. I’m either having an acid flashback, or it’s snowing.

Dave Bonta January 29, 2009

A dozen doves take flight all at once—a confusion of flutes. From the almost-finished house a quarter mile away, the scream of a power saw.

Dave Bonta January 28, 2009

Like sand in an hourglass this pellet snow. Three craters in the yard—grass, leaves—from something that’s trying to turn back the clock.

Dave Bonta January 27, 2009

The promised snowstorm has yet to arrive. The air is dead still, and an hour after daybreak, the ground remains lighter than the sky.

Dave Bonta January 26, 2009

Silhouetted against the snow, not one but two rabbits! Winter says: where much is hidden, much is also revealed. Ask the great-horned owls.

Dave Bonta January 25, 2009

The sun glimmers from a shrinking patch of open sky along the horizon. Lake-bottom wrecks, in another minute the icy lid will cover us all.

Dave Bonta January 24, 2009

Treetops sway wildly at first light, squeaking and clattering. A rabbit zigzags across the yard, pausing at each dark patch of bare ground.

Dave Bonta January 23, 2009

A few hours above freezing yesterday, and the snowpack lost its ability to absorb sound. I sit in the dark listening to the roar of trucks.

Dave Bonta January 22, 2009

Fingers of sunlight stretch across the yard. The resident naturalist climbs the trail into the woods with the aid of a long thin stick.

Dave Bonta January 21, 2009

A gray squirrel sits motionless for several minutes on the topmost crook of a fallen limb. Then like a diver it plunges into the snow.

Dave Bonta January 20, 2009

Clear and cold at dawn, with a crescent moon tangled in the treetops. A tiny white prayer flag flutters from a branch: some vacant cocoon.

Dave Bonta January 19, 2009

With each new snowfall the ground grows more uniform, our footprints grow harder to read, and cries die quickly, as in a soundproofed room.

Dave Bonta January 18, 2009

A titmouse lands on a snowy branch and puffs out the white down on its breast. From above the spring, a chickadee’s two-note song: hey ho.

Dave Bonta January 17, 2009

Sparrow tracks in the thin snow under my chair: I see dandelion seeds on the wind. The house shivers all over when the furnace kicks on.