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.
stream
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.
January 14, 2018
Cold deep as the sky’s blue, but the creek still sings its thaw song. Each dead grass clump is a Mecca for the fragmentary trails of birds.
January 4, 2018
Snow in the air, and on the ground, a flock of snowbirds: hopping through the deer-scraped patches, dropping down to the stream to drink.
November 21, 2017
Clear and still. A blue jay in the big maple drops down to the stream, and stands on the bank stabbing at the dark water with its bill.
November 12, 2017
Cold and quiet but for the stream’s gurgle. Bare limbs are pale in the half-strength sun, as if they’d all been barked clean by a porcupine.