Out early for the moon and whippoorwill, and soon enough the only blue sky we’re likely to see all day. Everything drips. Half-open aspen leaves hang like gray dishrags from the sapling in the yard.
moon
A crescent moon at dawn through trees on the cusp of leaf-out—possibly my last such view until October. It remains the only scrap of white in the sky as the sun’s first gleam tops the ridge.
Brick-red clouds barely move as a relentless wind rummages through the trees and shrubs on the ridgeside. A thin slice of moon gets lost among tossing limbs.
We may have lost an hour from our phones, but at least the nukes haven’t started flying yet. The half moon sets. A few drops of rain darken the sidewalk. I am regarded gravely by a red squirrel.
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.
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.
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.
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.