Overcast and quiet before dawn. A half-inch of fresh snow sticks to everything, glowing faintly in the light of a hidden moon.
moon
December 8, 2023
The moon’s bright bowl full of darkness rises through the trees at dawn and vanishes into clouds. Two great-horned owls on the valley side of the mountain carry on duetting.
October 29, 2023
Dead stillness giving way to rain at dawn, in the glowing absence of the full moon.
October 11, 2023
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
October 10, 2023
Within the moon’s crescent, its dark bulk is aglow—a reminder that Earth is still, somehow, a source of light. A towhee calls twice and goes back to sleep.
October 9, 2023
An hour before dawn, the crescent moon hangs just above the ridge, with Venus blazing like a campfire through the trees. It’s cold. An inversion layer brings the sound of every engine waking in the valley.
October 3, 2023
Moon above, mist below, and the treetops shot with sun. Jays call back and forth, acorns filling the pouches in their throats.
October 2, 2023
Sitting by the front door to enjoy the moon, I’m startled by a rabbit running between my feet in her eagerness to graze. Five minutes later she runs back to evade a weasel loping down the road. Orion emerges from the trees.
October 1, 2023
A moon gone slightly flat hangs in the big walnut trees over my mother’s house, which periodically release their ordnance onto the roof with a bang.
September 12, 2023
The old moon is now mostly ember, clasped by a thin crescent no brighter than nearby Venus. The loud highway noise from the west that portends nice weather.
September 7, 2023
Just at the point where the half-moon loses its share of the shadows, a migrant thrush calls from the woods’ edge: a few soft notes, then silence. The sky turns pink.
August 31, 2023
The full moon sits on the horizon, serenaded by cold crickets. Overhead, the Pleiades wink out one by one, leaving Jupiter alone in the crown of a locust.
August 11, 2023
Before the first birds, a thin, gaping moon. A last katydid stopping mid-creak. The whine of tires on the highway over the ridge.
August 3, 2023
An orange moon gone slightly flat hangs in the southwest at dawn. An eight-point buck grazes under the old lilac.