The black birch catkins are even longer and yellower than yesterday, shining in the rain. The shadbush have traded blossoms for pale leaves.
Plummer’s Hollow
A red-tailed hawk flies just inside the woods’ edge, past the birches with their catkins and the rambling old lilac just coming into bloom.
The rhyming couplets of a brown thrasher. A blue-headed vireo’s dreamy soliloquy. When the sun comes out, raindrops glisten on every twig.
Something sets off the neighbor’s rooster, and a few moments later a raven flies past the porch, croaking like a duck with laryngitis.
The tulip tree’s leaves have burst their buds—a pale green cloud. A gnatcatcher in the shadbush darts and hovers like a slow hummingbird.
I can’t see the pear tree behind the house, but from time to time a few petals flutter down among the cabbage white butterflies in the yard.
Against dark clouds, the white blossoms of shadbush massed at the woods’ edge. A vole breaks cover in the yard: a gray streak.
The buzzing dog-fights of carpenter bees competing for access to the porch’s old wood. The first tiger swallowtail flutters into the yard.
Sunny and cool. Two crows drive a third out of the pines with a low-in-the-throat noise that would sound threatening in any language.
High in the lilac, a squirrel wedges a freshly dug-up walnut between three branches, descends, climbs back, retrieves it and carries it off.
A red-bellied woodpecker’s flight like a fast oarsman, far-apart wingbeats propelling it through the blue. It disappears into a tall locust.
Red maple trees blossom on their own schedules. The branches I watched the moon slip through like a slow fish last night are now ablaze.
In the shadow of the wicker chair, a paper wasp walks in circles like a broken wind-up toy. I sit in the too-warm sun reading about the sun.
Bright and still. Two dozen gnats form a cloud of Brownian motion, rising and falling above a fixed point—some stone or blade of grass.