Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.
Plummer’s Hollow
Sunlight leaks down from the treetops. A blue jay’s brassy call. Then the silence resumes where it left off.
In the dark of the moon, the luminance of stars. From town, a wailing of fire sirens, their literally compelling music an eerie, out-of-sync duet.
Rain easing off by mid-morning. At one end of the lilac, I spot some dark leaves: buckthorn, I think, grown 10 feet tall without my noticing.
The sun passes through windrows of clouds. It’s quiet. I look forward to another day waiting for the Godot that is a Verizon repairman.
5:58 am. The crescent moon is increasingly alone in the sky as the dawn light metastasizes. A distant whippoorwill.
And just like that, it’s autumn: clear and cool, the meadows yellow with goldenrod. A hummingbird visits the Mexican sunflower. How long till she’s off to Mexico herself?
Rain thickens toward mid-morning as the ex-hurricane moves through. One cricket still calls from the shelter of peony leaves.
Humid, overcast and cool. I study the flamboyant gestures of certain meadow plants already more than half-way dead. A fat beetle flies past.
Almost fall. The motherless fawn running out of the woods has lost its spots but not its cloud of flies.
The fog slowly lifts, except where it’s been trapped by funnel spider webs. The cardinal’s cheer seems a bit misplaced.
Fog. A quiet gurgle from the stream, still digesting last night’s downpour. The only other song belongs to a vireo.
Ten minutes till sunrise. The gibbous moon is losing its glow like a guitar pick thrown from a stage.
In the dawn light, a hummingbird double-checks that I’m not a flower, hovering over my head like a wild thought.