Walnut tree branches behind the house rock by turns, as if from the passage of some large animal, but it’s only this warm-blooded wind.
black walnut
September 28, 2011
The lowering sky lightens a little when the rain finally starts. Yellow leaves flutter down from the walnut tree like exhausted moths.
September 20, 2011
The walnut trees are already losing their leaves, turning into grotesquely well-hung skeletons a-tremble with squirrels.
August 26, 2011
A violently shaking black walnut branch passes its affliction to an adjacent locust: gray squirrel with an unripe walnut between its teeth.
December 21, 2010
Solstice sunrise turns the western ridge red as an altar. A brown creeper fishes in all the dark valleys of the walnut tree’s bark.
October 31, 2010
Below the porch, a dot of pink: a very late dame’s-rocket blooming the day after a hard frost. A brown creeper inspects a small walnut tree.
September 22, 2010
Dawn breeze. The whine of tires from the highway over the ridge is punctuated by the heavy thwacks of falling walnuts.
September 1, 2010
A goldfinch gone green lands among walnut leaves that have gone yellow. Below, a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker, nape turning orange.
March 2, 2010
A squirrel bounds over the snow with a newly disinterred walnut in its teeth. Behind it in the yard, a neat hole ringed with pieces of husk.
December 26, 2009
In the steady rain, a squirrel grabs an unburied black walnut from under the walnut-stained slush and carries it back up the tree.
October 31, 2009
Peeled flesh of a black walnut leaks pus onto the sidewalk, more indelible than a blood stain. A woodpecker cackles from a bone-white snag.
October 3, 2009
Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.
September 27, 2009
Two gray squirrels in their fall colors—snouts and bellies stained brown from walnut hulls—dash past each other on the rain-slick trunk.