Clear and still. I search the glowing trees for last night’s shapes in the moonlight: the monstrous puma, the opossum playing at death.
moon
A half moon high overhead, fading as the fog rises off the meadow. A nuthatch lands on the dead elm’s smooth trunk and turns all about.
Before dawn, the half moon’s flat edge passing through different types of clouds like a cheese knife. The neighbor’s rooster starts to crow.
Red maple trees blossom on their own schedules. The branches I watched the moon slip through like a slow fish last night are now ablaze.
The loud rasp of squirrel teeth trying to gain entry to the chambers of a black walnut. Gibbous moon like an eggshell discarded in the sky.
Clear and cold at sunrise. A migrant thrush calls from the not-yet-ruined temple of the trees. Overhead, the archaic smile of the moon.
A wash of cirrus below the moon’s inverted bowl. A northern pearly-eye butterfly perches on the porch, bullseyes shining on its underwings.
Beads of rain that were shining moonlets 10 hours ago are now mere glitter. Night has shrunk to the dark iridescence in a butterfly’s wing.
4:50 a.m.: moonlight and dawn-light are at equilibrium. Then the whip-poor-will starts his insane chant. Other birds wake and chime in.
I take my eye off the clear sky for a moment and suddenly there are clouds—four streaks beside the moon’s thin frown. Cerulean warbler song.
Leaves still cling to the tall locusts—threadbare coats of gold beneath the fourth-quarter moon, pale as a discarded toenail clipping.
A galaxy of sparkles in the yard where the sunlight hits a patch of frost. The fourth-quarter moon hangs low over the trees. A grouse drums.
Wind and sun and bitter cold. A faint trace of white on the ground, as if left over from last night’s full moon.
Wind tosses the leaves that last night were glistening in the moonlight. A blue jay does its red-tailed hawk imitation, but nobody’s fooled.