A red dawn, a redder sunrise, and a rain shower half an hour after that on the still-novel metal roof. I imagine a steel-pan drummer playing avant-garde calypso.
rain
Every morning should come with fog like this, and the leftovers of an all-night rain still dripping onto the porch roof, and bright lichen on dark bark, and chickadees.
After rain in the small hours, a clearing wind at dawn. Winter wren song issues from a hole in the road bank—a quiet torrent.
Another dark, rainy dawn. I can’t stop thinking of my last dream before waking, in which I had died and reincarnated as a deer. I had so many legs, and everything was delicious!
The rain slackens toward mid-morning and I can hear chirps and twitters: warblers in their muted autumn colors foraging for breakfast in the treetops.
Rain. The rumble of a distant jet. A squirrel crouches on a limb with her tail over her head, chiseling open a walnut.
The rain goes on and on for hours. I watch a drenched squirrel at the end of a branch lose his grip on a walnut. A small brown moth circles my face.
Dark and rainy at sunrise, the cardinal like a pilot light in the recesses of the lilac chirping back and forth with his mate.
Rainy and cold. The tall goldenrod heads are bowed, flowering downward. A squirrel’s keening alarm for a hawk.
Drizzle before dawn, settling into steady rain by daybreak. At the woods’ edge, two chirps from a towhee and the soft call of a migrant thrush.
A soft, steady rain at dawn. At sunrise, a hummingbird buzzes in to sip from the jewelweeds under the porch roof dripline.
Overcast and damp. The roofs drip; leaves glisten. The sound of fast squirrel claws on bark. An animal under the house lets out a snarl.
Light rain at sunrise, drumming on the porch roof—not enough to still the crickets or keep the hummingbird from her appointed rounds.
Everything drips and glistens after last night’s storm. Red-bellied woodpeckers exchange calls then lapse into silence. A distant train.