5:13 a.m. 61 degrees, wind NNE 0 mph. Sky: a line or two of clouds in the south, spotless everywhere else, gradually lightening lumen by lumen, as the heaven wipes the sleep from its eyes. Permanent streams: emulating birdsong; both drying up; detectable pulse in upper; ratcheting scarcity in lower, joins the water table below the surface. Wetlands: a suggestion of ground fog, the softest of brushstrokes that thickens and spreads; a green frog, the sole voice across a vast marsh. Pond: a mist maker; the hum of crickets replaces the chatter of birds; bubbles of methane rising from the sediments gives me something to watch . . . otherwise an unmarred surface, dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta.
A great blue heron, pipe neck folded and stilt legs trailing, toes impossibly long, up in the south above the outflow, where frogs convene, wings extend and curved downward like a long, narrow umbrella. What scientists and architects call camber, emblem of a mythic and ubiquitous wading bird. Great blue heron: the silhouette of nobility; the voice of indigestion. Mantled by mist, circling, circling, circling. As still as stone.
Morning of the hermit thrush, sweet voices electrify the gloom. Where were you for the past six weeks? I want to bottle up the song of the blueberry-voiced bird, to preserve like summer jam; and then replay on drizzly November mornings; thrush song rising within me, a euphoric ascendancy . . . a welcome counterpoint during a spell of bleakness. Hermit thrush makes my world a better place.
Such poetry here/hear....