The half-moon at dawn wears the sparest of halos, glowing like an ear into which someone has just whispered something scandalous.
moon
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.
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.