Overcast and cool with jays, jays, jays. A red-tailed hawk’s pale breast flashing through the leaves, the sound of wingtips clipping limbs.
All the small birds converge on a birch tree to scold some hidden thing. It never stirs. They drift away. Sunlight settles on the leaves.
Pieces of walnut husk plop onto the driveway. A yellow leaf trapped by caterpillar silk flops like a fish a foot above the fishless stream.
At first light, the soft wickering of migrant wood thrushes. A deer snorts three times, and suddenly I’m seeing a bear in every shadow.
Blue jays in the rain, less blue than gray, converge on an oak one tree in from the edge, tails like hands spread for a throw of dice.
I dream of giant salamanders and wake to a pair of red-tailed hawks on the tree limb closest to the porch, heads pivoting like gun turrets.
The door under the porch is ajar, as if a bear or burglar had been there. Strangled cries from overhead: a crow diving at a slow hawk.
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.
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.