clarity of our time

Each morning, first thing:  canopy over Little Crum Creek.
.

awake–                                felled trees–                          the clarity of our time
….snowfall                           ….spaces that shape
……..traced limbs

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Between a sycamore and maple

Jupiter & the moon beneath Venus.
March 25, 2012.

 

 

 

Little Crum Creek
 
 
comes and goes–

 
 

 
 
the waxing moon
 
 
beside Jupiter and Venus.

 

The maple moon

Steadily a cold season moon waxes toward full,

nightly climbing a bare-limbed horizon,

when suddenly a red maple, lashed with fresh flowers,

signals spring’s arrival upon winter’s final round.

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.

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I see the morning light

From the western side of Little Crum Creek,
it seems that autumn’s fall prepared the trees
to welcome winter’s sunrise.

.

 

Under a blue cloud sky

Little Crum Creek has recently enjoyed a welcome relief from July’s heat & humidity.

Friends featured here continue to come & go.

The fruits of mulberry trees are fully gone now, and wineberries have largely departed from their brambles.

But pokeweed has been flowering & fruiting new green berries.

Easily approachable young robins still wait on lawns for feedings while  mallard ducklings, nearly full-grown, paddle up and down the stream for strength & skill in a burgeoning school behind mama marm.

Bankside, a new generation of lean woodchucks dart along paths into holes, not yet waddling comically like their elders, who easily mosey into close proximity of anything still and quiet.

Cicada songs steadily increase throughout the day.

And evening’s flicker of fireflies are suddenly past peak, waning with Friday’s Full Buck Moon.

The namesake deer occasionally turn stones under hoof in the traversable stream, snapping brush & fallen branch to browse the delicate jewelweed …

which has just shown its first few ephemeral flowers…

under the full red maple …

and blue cloud sky.

 

Lunar eclipse

 This week a friend and guide recalled some Thoreau for me:

“You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”

 And this morning, in the quiet vigil of cold clear hours, earth turned to cast our collective shadow on the sky above Orion.  We had only then open our eyes to behold, in the long dark before dawn, Little Crum Creek exhibiting its tawny mark with all the world on autumn’s final full moon.

 

Clear nights

Crescent moon, waxing and setting, in the western sky.

Soon appearing on either side, Orion (below, left) and Taurus (above, right).

Castor and Pollux standing by.

(April 18-19, after 8pm)