Clear and cold. I follow my breath as it drifts over the ridges and valleys of the tin roof sheltering the oil tanks. A patter of acorns.
Dave Bonta
One of the autumn grasses beloved of Basho blooms an alien red at the edge of the yard. Sudden jumbled music from a V of non-migrant geese.
Some small hawk has been calling since first light, hidden in the treetops: soft brief cries, soon joined by a chorus of its enemies.
Last night the air was warm, but the stars gleamed like steel. This morning it’s overcast and cold. New splashes of yellow in the birches.
I sit admiring the stillness and symmetry of a brown moth on the freshly painted white rafters—a moth that turns out to be, alas, a leaf.
Sitting under the portico while the paint dries on the porch. The crickets sound different here. A phoebe calls for the first time in weeks.
Neighboring chipmunks locked in a chipping contest: when one falters, the other pauses, too. The crowns of the oaks slippery with sunlight.
Rain starts almost imperceptibly, thickening from shimmer to mist to curtain. Early goldenrod and white snakeroot are both fading to brown.
Riddle me this: Because of the heavy acorn crop, next summer we will see more roses. And this: the oak forest moves north on corvid wings.
I glance up from my reading to meet the sun’s bleary eye. A squirrel bent into a ball, dangling tail curled left, pauses—a semicolon pose.
The doe is turning from the top down, like a mountain: summer’s red has receded into her legs and belly. On the fawn, just five faint spots.
Every overcast morning is overcast in its own way. This one’s dull and slow, a gray squirrel on a small dead tree licking its genitals.
Labor Day. A spring peeper at dawn. In the great silence, I can hear the approach of what will turn into drizzle: the thinnest of whispers.
Overnight, two maples on the far side of the road have begun to go orange. And between me and them, a small pale spider with her tiny prey.