Blue jays yelling in the treetops. Wind speed is less than three knots, but still there’s a steady shower of yellow walnut leaves.
black walnut
A squirrel hangs by its hind feet to pick a pair of walnuts, drops one, climbs off with the other in its teeth. The day darkens into rain.
A small brown butterfly flutters low over the porch floor, checking out the three brown walnut leaflets, one of which trembles in its wake.
A thin bead curtain hangs from the walnut tree: tiny tussock moth caterpillars, curled tight as question marks, rappelling down to the road.
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.
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.