After the rain, a drying breeze, shrinking the wet spots around the leaves strewn across the porch floor. Yellow tips rise. Edges flutter.
September 2015
9/29/2015
I wake from a dream of a pub that served nothing but wheat beer to endless rain on yellow leaves: birch and elm, walnut and tulip tree.
9/28/2015
As leaves begin to flutter in the rain, I notice the small birds fluttering underneath them, like a flash mob that was there all along.
9/27/2015
Two crickets are having a singing contest among the stiltgrass, which is now quite red and swept back in one direction as if with a comb.
9/26/2015
The black walnut trees shed their leaves into the wind like feathers stripped from the wings of Miltonian angels. The walnuts thunder down.
9/25/2015
Breezy and cool. The spider with the banded legs at the end of the porch clutches the husk of a stinkbug, rotating it, looking for morsels.
9/24/2015
Another cloudless morning. Chipmunks chase each other through a bar of sunlight on the forest floor. The distant, metallic calls of a raven.
9/23/2015
Thick fog at mid-morning. The sudden cry of a Canada goose right above the trees, the sound of its wingbeats. The squirrels crying back.
9/22/2015
Overcast and cool. Tiny, pale-winged insects drift back and forth, and—perhaps not coincidentally—the yard trees seethe with small birds.
9/21/2015
The wind is out of the east, and, slight as it is, carries an acrid, chemical smell from the sewage plant and the quarry’s dull roar.
9/20/2015
Clear and cold after last night’s showers. In the garden, the asters are all pinched shut like collapsed eyes with long, purple lashes.
9/19/2015
Even unseen, the raven crying rawk rawk from high overhead makes the flat white sky more interesting. In the yard, a monarch’s regal orange.
9/18/2015
The rising sun illuminates old spiderwebs in the eaves, littered with insect body parts. Below, the flamboyant bones of dame’s-rocket.
9/17/2015
A squirrel explores the woods’ edge, running along the underside of a locust limb, nosing the ground, going to the very top of a dead tree.