Dawn light turns everything briefly to gold: house, trees, the three deer that run a short way into the woods and stop, nostrils flaring.
dawn
Dawn gives a rust-red belly to the clouds. Over the stream, I’m astonished to hear the ethereal notes of a hermit thrush song.
At first light, some newly toppled tree creaks in the wind. What I’d taken for the dog statue on the far side of the yard swivels its ears.
Dawn. A migrant wood thrush flits from branch to branch along the edge of the woods. In the yard, a grown fawn nuzzles its mother’s neck.
Watching night turn to day—a thing that should be gradual, but instead proceeds by small leaps of realization: “It’s lighter now!” Rain.
The dawn sky turns salmon. Down by the stream, the hollow cough of a deer. A swig of coffee and I’m off to count birds before the rain.
Dawn finds the walking onions still as trolls, except for a slight swaying—no doubt the wind. A mosquito bite swells between my knuckles.
Clear and bracing, like a shot of vodka. The thirteen cattail heads beside the springhouse sway gently in the dawn light.
Dawn: a thin band of vivid pink. I glance down at my coffee, and when I look back it’s gone, the sky’s gray. A titmouse’s monotonous song.
Dawn unveils a new snowfall light as down, all horizontal limbs redrawn in white like colonies of the horizon. I sit clipping my nails.
It’s still mostly dark when the first faint pink spot appears in the clouds: day advancing like a disease, slow and red. A raven croaks.
Drifts of white on the springhouse roof: not fallen blossoms, but last night’s pellet snow. Tree creaks join the dawn chorus.
Shirtsleeves at dawn. I rub my eyes at the new blossom-clouds, at green fogs of leaves. It’s too sudden, a premature ejaculation of spring.
Dawn. The Cooper’s hawk is back, his kak-kak-kak echoing off the icy snow. I scan the trees, a haystack of branches, for that fierce needle.