Gloomy skies brighten. An enormous, seemingly dead cranefly dangling from a spiderweb flutters to life. I pull it free and it sails off.
Month: September 2020
Hard rain. My brain feels sluggish, despite coffee. A flash of lightning like the apotheosis of all this yellow.
With each breeze, a shower of yellow leaves. Now and then a whole walnut leaf—spine and rib bones sinking together in this sea of air.
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
Thin fog at sunrise. Four deer in the yard ignore me only to stamp and snort at a small black cat.
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
A warmer morning; the blue sky harbors an ever-so-slight suggestion of haze. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling open a black walnut.
Equinox. I spot some goldenrod, done flowering, turning yellow a second time. My mother stops by to tell me about a singing porcupine.
Cool and clear. The witch hazel in front of the living room window, which I haven’t gotten around to pruning out, is already turning gold.
The dial thermometer’s red arrow has just missed 0°C. A black tiger moth caterpillar is curled by the stoop like a dropped comma.
Cold and clear. Jays call up in the woods: at least one oak must’ve defied the drought and held on to its acorns.
First light. Ghostly figures in the meadow shrink into common snakeroot. The distant gargle of a truck jake-breaking off the interstate.
Dawn. Two wrens rustle awake inside the old hornets’ nest. A doe and her nearly grown fawn graze in the yard.
Sun grown vague with haze from the burning of the west. The drone note of tree crickets, so much more introspective than cicadas.