Crescent moon high in the east at dawn. Great-horned owls duet in the distance. A long freight train wraps the mountain in its rumble.
dawn
The half-moon at dawn wears the sparest of halos, glowing like an ear into which someone has just whispered something scandalous.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Dawn. A raven emerges from a tall pine near the powerline, croaking and circling until his mate joins him. How is the wind this morning? Evidently just right.
Cold, quiet, and mostly clear for the solstice. Small clouds turn blood-red at dawn, fade to yellow, then turn a lurid orange at sunrise. A red squirrel pauses at the edge of the porch to glare at me.
Dark and still. A shadow bounds over the icy snow of my garden—weasel or flying squirrel? Ten minutes later, the first sparrows begin to chirp.
Very cold and still. A fingernail moon slips through the trees’ dark digits. Dawn comes with a shift of radiance from the snow-covered ground to the sky.
A bitter cold wind at dawn. A raven croaking as high as a crow flies over, setting off a chickadee. Then nothing again but the sound of wind.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Frosty and still at dawn. A hunter’s flashlight ascends a ridgetop tree and goes out, subsumed by the crescent moon’s open parenthesis.
A degree above freezing, with an inversion layer bringing sound from the quarry: shrill beeps and muffled thunders of stone. In the time it takes my cereal to cook, dawn pockets all the stars and planets, one by one.
Clear and still at dawn. As the last stars fade, the first sparrows begin to chirp. A crow alights on the tallest locust and begins to yell.
Dawn turns the western ridge orange, as the roar of traffic from an inversion layer nearly drowns out the waking songbirds—all but the Carolina wren, whose teakettle teakettle teakettle is never quiet.
Clear and very quiet at dawn. Some scattered towhee tweets. The thump of a walnut dropped by a half-awake squirrel.