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.
moon
The sun clears the ridgetop and a bank of clouds by 8:30. The female Carolina wren trills, but there’s no sign of the male, who was missing last night from his usual roost above the laundry-room door. A half moon hangs overhead, pale as a slice of apple.
Frosty and still at dawn. A hunter’s flashlight ascends a ridgetop tree and goes out, subsumed by the crescent moon’s open parenthesis.
Mostly clear after last night’s rain. A flat-tire moon hangs low in the west. The wingbeats of a raven are, for a few moments, the loudest sound.
An hour before sunrise, the crescent moon makes a brief appearance through the clouds. A barred owl calls. Two hunters follow their flashlight beams into the woods.
The gibbous moon high overhead gives a ghostly second life to the white snakeroot in the yard, its seedy inflorescences seeming to bloom again. Then an air-braking 18-wheeler bellows for the dawn, and they begin to fade.
A knife-thin moon fades into the dawn sky. The only cloud huddles in the bottom corner of the meadow, where a phoebe is calling.
Mounds of white snakeroot in the yard glow dimly in the light of a half moon. Orion gets one leg over the ridge before he starts to fade, and the soft calls of migrant thrushes fill the trees.
Canada geese, a screech owl, some crows, and the inevitable wren sing in the sunrise, the western ridge turning red under a flat-tire moon.
Cold, clear, and still at sunrise, with little sign of the more than two million birds who streamed overhead during the moonlit hours aside from a few soft, scattered chirps.
Half a moon alone in the sky. A silent catbird flies into the half-dead lilac. Off through the forest, blinding fragments of the sun.
Sunrise reddens the western ridge as the flat-tire moon fades, alone in the sky. Jewelweed flowers along the stream nod and sway as the first hummingbird makes her rounds.
Clear and cold at dawn. The nearly full moon gutters among the trees. A screech owl trills with a rising intonation, which feels like some kind of omen.
Cool and clear at sunrise, with a sliver of moon like an open parenthesis for something left unsaid. A hummingbird drawn in by purple bergamot sips from the drab white soapwort instead.