A three-point buck emerges from the woods, hooves crunching through the icy seep, the sky pink behind him and ahead, the blood-red hill.
November 17, 2008
November 16, 2008
November 15, 2008
I sit in the dark listening to the downpour, trying to pick out all the different instruments: roof, road, weeds, trees, leaf litter, creek.
November 14, 2008
Thick fog prolongs the dawn light for hours. A screech owl is answered by a pileated woodpecker, dirge giving way to second-line ululation.
November 13, 2008
November 12, 2008
Two white-tailed deer leap through the dried goldenrod and asters beyond the springhouse, surfacing, diving—dolphins in a brown sea.
November 11, 2008
At first light, a siren goes off and doesn’t stop, a high steady note as if from a Tibetan prayer bowl. Please God, I mutter, make it stop.
November 10, 2008
The urgent grunts of a buck in rut chasing two does through the laurel, their movements easy to follow now that the trees are nearly bare.
November 9, 2008
Cold and overcast. Four silent bluebirds drop into the spicebush in my herb garden and begin gobbling the blood-red drupes, stones and all.
November 8, 2008
A hard rain overnight has reduced the forest canopy to tatters. Where cherry leaves had hung, nothing but beads of water reflecting the sky.
November 7, 2008
November 6, 2008
The wind is out of the east, bringing routine news of violence to the pitted earth. A bare birch at the woods’ edge fills up with finches.