Another warm morning. I realize I like the dead cherry because it reminds me of winter. A young robin lands on a branch with its beak open.
May 2011
May 30, 2011
A dry rattle in the pre-dawn dark: chipping sparrow. I lace up my boots, feeling for the eyelets like a clumsy reader of Braille.
May 29, 2011
A silk thread—spiderweb? Caterpillar line?—fetches up against the hairs of my arm, sticky, barely visible. A swallowtail’s random dance.
May 28, 2011
A mourning cloak butterfly circles the porch and yard three times, going behind my chair, including me in whatever it means to outline.
May 27, 2011
Random lilac, red maple and black cherry leaves have flipped over, exposing their pale undersides—evidence of a downpour in the wee hours.
May 26, 2011
The early-morning air is already thick with the smell of heat. Sunlit rooms in a palace of leaves. The oriole’s glossy song.
May 25, 2011
Coffee in my left hand, I weed the herb bed with my right, muttering at the clover: out with you, foul sweetener! as my fingers turn black.
May 24, 2011
The first irises have opened in the night, some with red and yellow tongues, some with violet, sampling the morning air.
May 23, 2011
Overcast and damp. The yellow centers of fleabane flowers, closed for the night, are beginning to peek through their spiralled white lashes.
May 22, 2011
While the catbird warbles jazz, a chipmunk skitters to a halt on the rock wall, sits back on its haunches and scratches its crotch.
May 21, 2011
A breeze stirs the tulip tree from top to bottom, its four-fingered mitts rocking, cautious as the queen of England’s white-gloved wave.
May 20, 2011
Each glaucous leaf of the bleeding-heart has rolled its rain into one fat bead. I’m wondering: where have all the wood thrushes gone?
May 19, 2011
Phoebe in the barnyard, pewee in the woods. What is it about cleared land that turns a lilting refrain into a burden, a shrill work song?
May 18, 2011
A light drizzle. The one green leaf at the end of a branch on the otherwise dead cherry shakes itself dry and turns back into a hummingbird.