The Morning Porch

February 5, 2009 by Dave Bonta

1°F. A breeze feels as sharp as the studded rim of the sun rising through the trees. The call of a cardinal like an engine trying to start.

February 4, 2009 by Dave Bonta

At first light, some large animal crunching through the snowpack at the woods’ edge. It slows, stops. I wait for daybreak: nothing there.

February 3, 2009 by Dave Bonta

At half-light, small explosions of wings and twittering from around the side of the house as birds leave their roosts in the cedar tree.

February 2, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Tracks left yesterday morning have grown blurry and distended. Every weed and grass stem is a bull’s-eye at the center of a pit.

February 1, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Clear at sunrise. The squeaks of courting squirrels are almost indistinguishable from the squeaks of the trees, rocking in the warm wind.

January 31, 2009 by Dave Bonta

I can hear my mother yelling at the squirrels: Go! Go! Go! It occurs to me that snow is the opposite of water, slippery when dry.

January 30, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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.

January 29, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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.

January 28, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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.

January 27, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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

January 26, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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

January 25, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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.

January 24, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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

January 23, 2009 by Dave Bonta

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.