Clear, cold and very quiet, expect for bird calls and the trickle of the stream. Since I’m late in rising, a leaf has taken my seat.
stream
November 5, 2018
The big dead elm has collapsed into the stream, its rain-slick bole broken in two places. A drenched phoebe hawks insects in the grass.
November 1, 2018
November 1st, and the stream’s gurgle sounds somehow different. A Halloween ladybug wanders the rectilinear wilderness of a porch column.
September 26, 2018
The rain has stopped but the creek keeps singing like a drunk going home from a party. The sun comes out and all the house’s windows fog up.
September 12, 2018
Home! A migrant wood thrush softly calls over the roar of the rain-swollen creek. In the big tulip tree, a squirrel is building a drey.
April 16, 2018
The sound of water has returned to the mountain. Trees wear dark suits of rain embroidered with lichen. In every puddle the same blank sky.
April 11, 2018
The creek has shrunk to a slow procession of vowels, monotonous as any interior monologue. From above the clouds, the rumble of a jet.
April 8, 2018
Weak sunlight and the creek’s quiet gurgle. I think of the dead deer up in the field, her throat torn open by coyotes, feeding their songs.
February 23, 2018
The cold rain continues, now misting, now pouring. Beds of moss in the woods begin to look luxurious. Everywhere the sound of running water.
February 22, 2018
Steady downpour; almost as much water in the road as in the creek. Scattered, flattened stalks in the rain-dark yard are white with mold.
February 17, 2018
The sun burns through high clouds. A gleam in the stream from a clump of sedge where spray has made an ice-fingered claw open to the sky.
February 16, 2018
It’s been raining for 15 hours; the creek roars. The snowy ridges the plow made now resemble the mountains I know, orphaned, deeply eroded.
February 13, 2018
A soft, cloud-filtered sunlight makes the white hillside glow rather than gleam. The rime-lined creek is still loud from yesterday’s thaw.
January 25, 2018
The stream gurgles like a bird: two ways at once. On the far side of a snag, a knock I take for a woodpecker, though it could be anyone.