Dead stillness giving way to rain at dawn, in the glowing absence of the full moon.
moon
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
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.
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.
Moon above, mist below, and the treetops shot with sun. Jays call back and forth, acorns filling the pouches in their throats.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before the first birds, a thin, gaping moon. A last katydid stopping mid-creak. The whine of tires on the highway over the ridge.
An orange moon gone slightly flat hangs in the southwest at dawn. An eight-point buck grazes under the old lilac.
A turkey hunter’s pickup rumbles past. The moon pale as a glowworm glimmers in the treetops as a whippoorwill clears his throat.
First morning back after vacation, the setting moon is somehow already full. A fox sparrow sings beside the old springhouse. Up in the woods, the first blue-headed vireo tunes up.