5:45 a.m. 62 degrees, wind 2 mph; aspen leaves in motion. Sky: mottled; bright with peach highlights; air refreshed; leaves and needles hung with rain. Permanent streams: upper and lower bound for glory; flowing and gurgling, although not quite as loud as I had expected; both unload in the marsh. Intermittent streams: flowing and vaguely humming; attenuated and shallower than permanent streams, with which they merge; a woodland circulatory system that begins as mushy depressions strewn across the hillside; many linger as seeps and springs. In a rainless day or two, the water table recedes; intermittent streams dry up, the tropical storm a memory. Wetlands: more vibrant than yesterday; a run of green and beige with spirea flower heads pinking the drier rims; mist an afterthought. Pond: trace exhalations drift east; across a faintly jiggled surface, the reflection of two black-eyed Susans, an upside-down Monet. Crickets louder than birds. A rain of ash seeds loosened by the wind (I thought they had all come down a month ago); junco food. A colony of maidenhair fern, wet fronds tilt toward the road, overlap like snake scales. Small limbs and twigs and a thirty-foot snag brought down by the high wind, a forest pruning. Old leaning aspen still upright.
Pre sunrise, three hummingbirds, hovering, and chasing each other around the feeder. A pair of robins quietly clucking. Four other parties in the maples. Blue jays and crows, red-breasted nuthatch, a fluty thrush deep in the woods, a solitary red-eyed vireo reminds me he's still around, still singing.
Several hundred feet above the marsh, flying due south, one barn swallow en route to Central or South America. A graceful little bird, alone in a vast sky, headed toward the seaboard. I recall August gatherings of barn swallows above Cape Cod, and the barrier beaches of Long Island, gracefully (and gratefully) hawking greenhead flies over the salt marsh. All motion, like campfire sparks, twisting and turning, mouths agape trolling for flies. Occasionally, a merlin, also on the move, chased one straight up the sky ladder, where a delicate bird—no matter how graceful—staggers in the turbulence, becomes vulnerable.
Enchanted, I watch the swallow arrow above the pine and spruce, above the maple and beech; an envoy from beyond vanishes into the morning like a thought unleashed, a great unifier that stitches together seemingly disparate worlds, makes a mockery of civilization. Ignores boundaries, ideologies, religions, misinformation, fake news, political parties, pandemics. Unveils the poetry of the real world, reminds me that like the constellated sky, Earth carries the fascinating burden of its own history, enticing and ebullient—the price of admission: stop and look.