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
5/30/2011
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.
5/29/2011
A silk thread—spiderweb? Caterpillar line?—fetches up against the hairs of my arm, sticky, barely visible. A swallowtail’s random dance.
5/28/2011
A mourning cloak butterfly circles the porch and yard three times, going behind my chair, including me in whatever it means to outline.
5/27/2011
Random lilac, red maple and black cherry leaves have flipped over, exposing their pale undersides—evidence of a downpour in the wee hours.
5/26/2011
The early-morning air is already thick with the smell of heat. Sunlit rooms in a palace of leaves. The oriole’s glossy song.
5/25/2011
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.
5/24/2011
The first irises have opened in the night, some with red and yellow tongues, some with violet, sampling the morning air.
5/23/2011
Overcast and damp. The yellow centers of fleabane flowers, closed for the night, are beginning to peek through their spiralled white lashes.
5/22/2011
While the catbird warbles jazz, a chipmunk skitters to a halt on the rock wall, sits back on its haunches and scratches its crotch.
5/21/2011
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.
5/20/2011
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?
5/19/2011
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?
5/18/2011
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.