Goldfinches twitter in the tops of the locusts at sunrise, bright as beacons. A yellow hoverfly watches me from four inches away.
sunrise
Sunrise stains the western ridge. A squirrel wanders back and forth on an icy snowbank, stirred, no doubt, by the memory of a buried nut.
Bitter cold at sunrise. A distant F-16: that high, harsh sound of something being torn. A few small clouds hurry off toward the sun.
A titmouse lands in the cherry, the streak in his breast the same rust as a tree sparrow’s cap, a broomsedge stem, these icicles at sunrise.
In the still air, a small disk of ash falls spinning like a demonic snowflake. The sun smolders on the ridgetop between columns of oaks.
Gray sky thin as an eyelid for the sun’s approximate blaze. The distant gargles of an 18-wheeler jake-breaking into town set off the crows.
Feathery contrails outline a wedge of blue. On a high branch, three mourning doves sit facing the sunrise. The middle one preens its wings.
Solstice sunrise turns the western ridge red as an altar. A brown creeper fishes in all the dark valleys of the walnut tree’s bark.
I arrive on the porch at the same time as the sun: the first blazing quills top the ridge and a sneeze begins to prickle behind my nose.
Five below zero Celcius at sunrise. A single kinglet flutters in the birch—its whispery chirps. The fourth-quarter moon’s thin grin.
A succession of anxious or querulous calls—nuthatch, crow, Cooper’s hawk, pileated woodpecker—until sunrise reddens the western ridge.
At 52 degrees, hornets are already going in and out of their gray globe in the weeds. I watch the sunrise by inference on the western ridge.
A chipping sparrow foraging below the porch at sunrise flits up to a branch with a beakful of fine, gray, nest-lining material: my own hair.
Yellow at daybreak: forsythia, daffodils, the spicebush by the springhouse, a flock of goldfinches… what else? The sun crests the ridge.