Clear and still. I search the glowing trees for last night’s shapes in the moonlight: the monstrous puma, the opossum playing at death.
Year: 2020
Low cloud ceiling. Three flocks of resident Canada geese go over the house, one after another, in formations as disorderly as their cries.
A shimmer of moisture in the air, interrupted here and there by an actual raindrop. The roof drips. It’s cold. The lurid colors appall.
Half an hour past sunrise, three sharp, rising notes turn out to be from a blue jay, who quickly switches to the familiar, declarative mode.
Walnuts crash down on the back roof. A raven comes croaking over the house, then returns a minute later, silent except for its wingbeats.
In the lily-of-the-valley bed decimated by drought, five blood-colored beads. The wind shuffles the leaves on the porch like playing cards.
Gloomy skies brighten. An enormous, seemingly dead cranefly dangling from a spiderweb flutters to life. I pull it free and it sails off.
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.