Walnut at the tip of a bent-down limb: a squirrel gets close, retreats, tries again. Abandons the tree for an oak, tail twitching.
September 2010
9/15/2010
Birdcalls are distant, intermittent. I’m reading about Auschwitz and thinking, it’s vital to learn the names. Someday it may be all we have.
9/14/2010
First rays of sun on the garden, and already a monarch is drinking from the half-opened asters, orange panes of its wings trembling, aglow.
9/13/2010
Ground fog forms at dawn in the bottom corner of the meadow and quickly dissipates. The screech owl’s quaver gives way to soft thrush calls.
9/12/2010
Rain at last! A gentle tapping on the roof. The parched aster in my garden half-opens its first purple eye.
9/11/2010
I hear it before I see it through the trees, crackling and popping in the tinder-dry sticks and leaf litter: a small herd of deer.
9/10/2010
The corpse of a moth flaps upside-down against the column. Beyond the springhouse, a broken branch dangles—the leaves’ pale undersides.
9/9/2010
Overcast at dawn except for a thin band on the horizon—enough for the light to leak through and spread its stain across the entire sky.
9/8/2010
Orion gets one leg above the trees before fading into the dawn. Inside, I rescue the cricket from a spider, put him out for the fourth time.
9/7/2010
Cloudy and cool. From the wood’s edge, a new song, wistful yet ebullient, from our most faithful, year-round singer, the Carolina wren.
9/6/2010
From the vicinity of the powerline—a stripe of sunlight through the woods—the sporadic want… want… want of a buck coming into rut.
9/5/2010
A cloudless sunrise. The woods are full of soft chirps—migrants, I suppose. Up by the barn, a phoebe calls for the first time in weeks.
9/4/2010
Windy and cool at sunrise. A large squadron of geese comes low over the porch—non-migrant locals, no doubt, infected with restlessness.
9/3/2010
High cumulonimbus drifting northward is the only sign of a hurricane’s distant churn. Tiny figures of birds head west toward the open sky.