Sunrise illuminates the hidden rooms of the elder tree. In one, a blackbird grooms, starting the day with the taste of its own feathers.
sunrise
Monday October 23, 2017
Brighter color between the trees: sunrise. Gray as their trunks: a doe and her grown fawns. From down hollow, a screech owl’s trill.
Friday September 22, 2017
Under dark clouds, the field full of goldenrod glows in the rising sun’s light like some Viking hoard in an archaeologist’s trench.
Saturday February 11, 2017
Ten degrees above freezing at sunrise. A squirrel leaps through the soft snow like a salmon swimming upstream. High overhead, a raven calls.
Saturday December 31, 2016
Cold and very still. The sun climbs through the ridgetop trees as slowly and bristly as a porcupine of light.
Tuesday December 20, 2016
Thick hoarfrost gives the sun rising through the trees a soft, glittery nimbus, and the aging snowpack has regained the sparkle of youth.
Tuesday November 22, 2016
Windy and cold. The rising sun peeks out from beneath a lid of clouds: in the sudden glow, goldfinches, their squeaky calls.
Tuesday October 11, 2016
Sunrise turns the western ridge red. A squirrel falls out of a walnut tree and lands with a thump in weeds white with the first frost.
Thursday September 22, 2016
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.
Sunday September 11, 2016
Cool and clear, with sunlight just beginning to gild the treetops. From the woods’ edge, the plucked-string call of a migrant tanager.