Cool and clear. Sunlight floods the crown of the tall tulip tree, which releases one yellow leaf into the still air, rocking from side to side as it falls.
sunrise
Cool and clear at sunrise, with a sliver of moon like an open parenthesis for something left unsaid. A hummingbird drawn in by purple bergamot sips from the drab white soapwort instead.
A crescent moon above the ridge at dawn is lost in fog by sunrise. A hummingbird bothers the bergamot, and a wood thrush is singing as lustily as if it were still June.
Overcast at sunrise. Each breeze brings a brief shower from a midnight storm. A mosquito wallows in the long hair of my forearm.
Out before sunrise, where the humidity has become visible: a thin fog through which I swim, leaving the porch for an early-morning hike to beat the heat.
Cool, clear and humid at sunrise. I watch a crow family waking up on their roost in an oak, the fledglings softly begging from the adults, who stretch and scratch.
Up for moonset and sunrise—both hidden by clouds. The dark yard, punctuated by the apostrophes of top-heading garlic, has a crow for a rooster.
Out before sunrise to catch the coolness, I rub a jewelweed poulice against a small poison ivy rash on my middle finger, feeling the itch subside and contemplating the yard, where poison ivy and jewelweed freely intermingle.
Clear at sunrise with an eyelash moon and a deer grazing just inside the woods’ edge. A Cooper’s hawk calls from atop the tallest black locust and flies off to the east.
Cool and mostly clear at sunrise. A goldfinch chirping in pentameter. The cerulean warbler changes trees—a blue-striped blur.
Sunrise hidden by fog, but already there’s a background buzz of periodical cicadas. A cerulean warbler sings at the woods’ edge, as usual, long after the wood thrush has lapsed into silence.
A lurid sun glimmers through high-altitude haze. Somewhere in the deep grass a hen turkey calls to her poults, as goldfinches party it up in the treetops.
A few clouds at sunrise. Goldfinches chatter over the rap battles of ovenbirds and vireos. Bracken leaves are still opening in the yard—feathers on feathers.
Foggy at sunrise. A turkey gobbles non-stop from up in the field, and the woods ring with vireos and ovenbirds. At the edge of the porch, a gray squirrel nuzzles her almost-grown offspring.