towhee

Friday August 15, 2008

Dave Bonta August 15, 2008

A still morning. Dew drips from the top roof onto the porch roof. Each birdcall—woodpecker, towhee, jay—is surrounded by acres of silence.

Dave Bonta June 12, 2008

Sun in the treetops where a catbird improvises. From the lilac, the song of a towhee, incorporated seconds later into the catbird’s stream.

Dave Bonta April 12, 2008

A towhee seems stuck in rehearsal: Drink! Drink your… Drink! Everything shines. A white-throated sparrow turns its song upside-down.

Clear and cold. A contrail feathers in several directions. The dog makes a half-hearted run at a wood pigeon, who takes a half-hearted hop. …

A raven flies over the house, croaking. I keep wiping droplets of mist off the glossy pages of the book I'm reading about the holocaust. …

Among the died-back stiltgrass below the porch, a cluster of native deer-tongue grass has emerged, pointed "tongues" just beginning to curl. …

In the big oaks tossing in the wind, finally some splotches of color. A freight train's out-of-tune horn blows a chord unknown to music. …

Gray rain ripples the air—November's fur blurring the last splashes of bright October: salmon-colored cherry leaves, a vivid limb of maple. …

Half an hour after sunrise, a shimmering oscillation, as if from a juggler of knives: despite the cold, a dragonfly is circling the yard. …

At the base of the hill, the meadow is white with frost. A small deer carries the white torch of its tail up into the sunlit woods. …

In the cold rain, a squirrel sits on an elm limb with its back to the trunk working on a walnut, its tail folded over its head like a hood. …

The first frost fades under a white sky. I'm noticing how at a distance even a sound like the banging of a hammer becomes a sort of music. …

Sun blazes through a newly open woods, glossy on the backs of wild turkeys: nine hens and two jakes, who keep pausing to fan their tails. …

In the pouring rain, a six-point buck rips leaves off a lilac branch that the storm broke down, his antlers the same color as the break. …

The French lilac, unseasonably green; Japanese barberries flaunting too-numerous fruit; me with my steaming Ethiopian brew, rain in my face. …