A slight breeze brings a shower of petals from the tulip tree, while a squirrel at the top of the black walnut makes it rain catkins.
black walnut
Sun in the treetops. A squirrel hangs head-down from a walnut branch to eat the flowers. My lover combs the tangles from her long hair.
Dawn. Three deer become two, become three again. The sound of squirrel teeth on black walnut shell—that harsh madman’s whisper.
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.
The lowering sky lightens a little when the rain finally starts. Yellow leaves flutter down from the walnut tree like exhausted moths.
The walnut trees are already losing their leaves, turning into grotesquely well-hung skeletons a-tremble with squirrels.
A violently shaking black walnut branch passes its affliction to an adjacent locust: gray squirrel with an unripe walnut between its teeth.
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.
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.
Dawn breeze. The whine of tires from the highway over the ridge is punctuated by the heavy thwacks of falling walnuts.
A goldfinch gone green lands among walnut leaves that have gone yellow. Below, a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker, nape turning orange.
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.
In the steady rain, a squirrel grabs an unburied black walnut from under the walnut-stained slush and carries it back up the tree.
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.