November 1st, and the stream’s gurgle sounds somehow different. A Halloween ladybug wanders the rectilinear wilderness of a porch column.
stream
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.
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.
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.
The creek has shrunk to a slow procession of vowels, monotonous as any interior monologue. From above the clouds, the rumble of a jet.
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.
The cold rain continues, now misting, now pouring. Beds of moss in the woods begin to look luxurious. Everywhere the sound of running water.
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.
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.
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.
A soft, cloud-filtered sunlight makes the white hillside glow rather than gleam. The rime-lined creek is still loud from yesterday’s thaw.
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.
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.
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.