Dawn. A coyote yipping and howling in the distance. The old hornets’ nest under the eaves gives birth to a Carolina wren.
dawn
In one hole in the clouds a meteor; in another the dawn. The scattered notes of night-flying migrants coming down to roost. A quarry truck beeping.
5:58 am. The crescent moon is increasingly alone in the sky as the dawn light metastasizes. A distant whippoorwill.
In the dawn light, a hummingbird double-checks that I’m not a flower, hovering over my head like a wild thought.
Cardinal joined by a whippoorwill. The white shapes in the yard turn out to be snakeroot.
Ten minutes before first light, the first distant, barking dog. Ten minutes before that, a barred owl’s cackle.
First light. A meteor slices through Orion below the belt, and I flinch like a spectator at a pro wrestling match.
Dawn. A bat zig-zags high over the meadow en route to its roost as the few clouds turn pink.
5:15. The crescent moon’s parenthesis gapes at Pleiades, which I watch until it’s subsumed into the dawn.
Dawn mediated by fog is slower, but it gets to the same, obvious spectacle in the end. And the usual wren has something to say about it.
Venus in the dawn sky. Phoebe, field sparrow, wood pewee. The alarm-snorts of a deer.
First light. Near where the stream gurgles under the road, a song sparrow sings a dream version of his usual song.
Dawn stealing influence from the just-past-full moon. The whip-poor-will awakening the catbird.
Dawn. A phoebe and a cardinal are singing in the rain. At the woods’ edge, the last patch of snow has shrunk to the size of a hubcap.