Red at dawn and again at sunrise, in case old sailors harbor any doubts about the forecast. A cold breeze gets up my nose, and the whole hollow echoes with the sneeze.
sunrise
Deep cold, with hoarfrost silvering every twig and dead weed. The sun clears the ridge and spreads glitter among the icicles. A white-breasted nuthatch begins to kvetch.
A drumbeat of meltwater dripping onto the porch roof as the sky clears, just in time for the sun to top the ridge. My bootprints from last night’s walk have grown huge and dark.
Up with the sun, facing each other across 93 million miles of silence. It’s cold. I close my eyes for the brief afterimage: stark branches against a blood-red sky.
Bitter cold. A few small clouds turn brick-red. When the wind drops, there’s a staccato burst of pileated woodpecker alarm, answered only by a nuthatch.
A dark and rainy dawn. Will anything mark the hidden sunrise? Yes: three crows fly right over the house, yelling. The rain continues.
The first sunrise above freezing in weeks. The sun climbs into the palest shade of blue as treetops sway and gyrate in the wind. A chickadee sings his springiest tune.
Wind and snow—a fresh two inches on everything. Sun-colored holes open in the gray clouds and swiftly close again. The cold creeps in through my coat.
After an orange sunrise, in the ordinary light of an overcast morning, the mechanical tapping of a downy woodpecker, the slow wingbeats of a raven.
A stray snowflake wanders down from the pink clouds, itself still white. Doves flock to the birdseed on my mother’s back porch—the silvery whistles of their wings.
Overcast and cold. Ten minutes before sunrise, a yellow rent appears in the clouds. In the distance, the neighbor’s chickens start up a racket.
Rainfall stopping by sunrise. An oak leaf comes sailing out of the woods and spirals down onto the porch. Holes in the clouds open and close like blue wounds.
Light rain at sunrise swept away by a light breeze, the monochrome sky accented by a pair of ravens, and down here a nuthatch going over the rules.
A red dawn, a redder sunrise, and a rain shower half an hour after that on the still-novel metal roof. I imagine a steel-pan drummer playing avant-garde calypso.