Clear at dawn. A pale slice of moon in the treetops, and below, the ethereal song of a hermit thrush.
moon
Half a moon slowly floating to the top of the tall tulip poplar. The lights of a jet with its roar a quarter of the sky behind.
Moonlight fades but the driveway glows even whiter: a new quarter-inch of snow. The sky is clear. Treetop goldfinches start to chatter.
Power outage at -9C. Moonlight gives way to dawnlight with the purring of a generator. It lugs down and I know my mother must be making breakfast.
Full moon gone in, I feel snowflakes on my face, their almost clinical touch. The sound of a train. The springhouse roof turning white.
Overcast, so it’s hard to tell exactly when moonlight gives way to dawn. A hunter’s flashlight climbs the ridge and is lost among the trees.
First frost, and the thinnest small boat of a moon riding low on the horizon with the bright darkness of its cargo.
They’re shapeshifting daily now, the faces in the thinning treetops silhouetted against the dawn sky. I push my glasses down to unblur the moon.
Gibbous moon overhead through a thin veil of fog. A breeze moves through the forest, liberating the night’s rain.
Cold and clear. Stars fade as the ground fog grows, partly lit by the crescent moon, partly by the dawn.
The unfamiliar clouds of my breath. A phoebe calling in the sun-drenched crown of a walnut tree, beneath that old slice of apple, the moon.
Spring peeper just after moonset. Then whippoorwill. Wood thrush. Carolina wren. Phoebe. A pileated woodpecker cackles and it’s day.
In the dark of the moon, the luminance of stars. From town, a wailing of fire sirens, their literally compelling music an eerie, out-of-sync duet.
5:58 am. The crescent moon is increasingly alone in the sky as the dawn light metastasizes. A distant whippoorwill.