Past 6:00, and it’s still warm and cloudy. But the moon soon breaks through into good weather. As its glow dims, the breeze turns cool.
moon
9/23/2010
Thick fog at daybreak, as if the bright moon of 2am had spread a kind of mildew over the mountain. Train whistle. A nuthatch’s nasal call.
7/30/2010
At last the garden cricket has a rival. They creak slowly back and forth. I scan the western sky for what’s left of last night’s moon.
6/30/2010
A phoebe pecks at the porch roof, then lands in the cherry tree with its feathers puffed out against the cold. The waning moon.
3/9/2010
Tundra swans at sunrise—their ethereal flutes, their shining white forms—are trailed by a local Canada goose and the crescent moon.
2/7/2010
The crescent moon behind the trees gives the newfallen snow an antique cast. It’s very cold. A distant train is the only other moving thing.
1/31/2010
Walking naked through the cold house at dawn, I’m startled by a bright light among the trees on the western ridge: the moon, big as a banjo.
1/30/2010
By dawn, the clear sky has given way to white, as if the full moon spilled over. If the clouds were a true cover, they’d trap more heat!
11/2/2009
For a half-hour after moonset, the sky is perfectly empty, the ground is still white. Then through the bare trees, this blemish of a sun.
10/14/2009
A patch of silver in the yard: first frost. A jet glints in the rising sun, its short contrail twice as bright as the crescent moon.
8/17/2009
Dawn fog lifts and pauses, so it’s clear to a height of ten feet, then white, then the crescent moon. A red-bellied woodpecker’s slow chant.
8/10/2009
Just before dawn, the creak of a tree in the woods, and then in the yard. A bindweed in the garden aims its white blunderbuss at the moon.