There’s a new hole in the hornets’ nest—flying squirrel? The scarlet oak we transplanted from the woods years ago is starting to color up.
Year: 2017
Three propeller planes in half an hour, noisy as airborne lawnmowers. It’s peak haiku time, but I could disappear into a novel.
Now that the walnut trees are bare I can see the aspens down along the boggy end of the meadow—leaves so quick to quake, so slow to let go.
Two patches of sunlight side-by-side on the myrtle: one direct from the sun that glistens, one reflected from a window that merely glows.
The builder leaves but hammering continues—a pileated woodpecker. Two chipmunks poke their heads out on either side of a rock in the wall.
Sun in the thinning treetops—a nest of needles. From the other house, the muffled sound of a drill teaching the wall to sing.
The train’s horn is full of Monday. Migrating towhees compare notes at the edge of the woods. A blue wound closing in the clouds.
Sunlight for the first time in days, flooding through new holes in the forest canopy. The wistful theme song of a white-throated sparrow.
The smell of wood smoke; I think of the fires in California. A dead limb at the woods’ edge crashes to the ground. A monarch’s small flame.
Cold and gloomy despite the bright leaves; even the wren sounds querulous. When I look again, the unmoving fly is gone from the wall.
Gold on gold: a kinglet’s crest among the birch leaves. Rust on rust: a chipmunk’s fur among rain-flattened tangles of stiltgrass.
Just past daybreak it begins to rain and the forest is full of falling leaves—a slow, steady flutter of summer yellow into the drab shadows.
Before dawn, the half moon’s flat edge passing through different types of clouds like a cheese knife. The neighbor’s rooster starts to crow.
In a lull between showers, a squirrel inches out along a slick black walnut twig. I decide the sound a falling walnut makes is SPLUD.