A mourning cloak butterfly circles the porch and yard three times, going behind my chair, including me in whatever it means to outline.
May 27, 2011
Random lilac, red maple and black cherry leaves have flipped over, exposing their pale undersides—evidence of a downpour in the wee hours.
May 26, 2011
The early-morning air is already thick with the smell of heat. Sunlit rooms in a palace of leaves. The oriole’s glossy song.
May 25, 2011
Coffee in my left hand, I weed the herb bed with my right, muttering at the clover: out with you, foul sweetener! as my fingers turn black.
May 24, 2011
The first irises have opened in the night, some with red and yellow tongues, some with violet, sampling the morning air.
May 23, 2011
Overcast and damp. The yellow centers of fleabane flowers, closed for the night, are beginning to peek through their spiralled white lashes.
May 22, 2011
While the catbird warbles jazz, a chipmunk skitters to a halt on the rock wall, sits back on its haunches and scratches its crotch.
May 21, 2011
A breeze stirs the tulip tree from top to bottom, its four-fingered mitts rocking, cautious as the queen of England’s white-gloved wave.
May 20, 2011
Each glaucous leaf of the bleeding-heart has rolled its rain into one fat bead. I’m wondering: where have all the wood thrushes gone?
May 19, 2011
Phoebe in the barnyard, pewee in the woods. What is it about cleared land that turns a lilting refrain into a burden, a shrill work song?
May 18, 2011
A light drizzle. The one green leaf at the end of a branch on the otherwise dead cherry shakes itself dry and turns back into a hummingbird.
May 17, 2011
The brown mountain of two weeks ago is now astonishingly green. Nothing I saw abroad holds a candle to this view, with its scarlet tanager.
April 30, 2011
The French lilac, backlit by the sun, shimmers like a bright green sail against the still-open woods. A field sparrow’s rising trill.
*
This will be the last new update until May 17th; I’m off to the U.K. to give a poetry reading and visit friends.
April 29, 2011
Two squirrels grappling or grooming on a thin tulip poplar branch, among nubbins of new leaves. One slips and falls 30 feet to the ground.