The latched door beneath the porch stands ajar. I step gingerly through the frost-edged blades of grass, carrying my coffee like a lamp.
Shadows of bare branches on the stark white side of my house like a portent of winter. A flock of 13 geese splits, re-forms, makes a U-turn.
I hear the grunting of a buck in rut, but see only a grown fawn chasing a doe. As they pass below the porch, I hear the bleat in his voice.
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.
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.