Walnuts crash down on the back roof. A raven comes croaking over the house, then returns a minute later, silent except for its wingbeats.
black walnut
With each breeze, a shower of yellow leaves. Now and then a whole walnut leaf—spine and rib bones sinking together in this sea of air.
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
A warmer morning; the blue sky harbors an ever-so-slight suggestion of haze. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling open a black walnut.
A field sparrow fresh from bathing and a hummingbird fresh from fighting sit two feet apart on a walnut branch, shaking their feathers.
A sunny morning foreclosed upon by leaden clouds. The phoebe continues to rant from atop a black walnut sapling, marking time with his tail.
Snow flurries. A raven croaks, and I scan the sky for it without success, spotting instead an old bird’s nest at the top of a walnut tree.
A gray squirrel runs along the gray road bearing a freshly dug-up walnut. High in the blue, a jet’s contrail is short enough to be a tail.
Light snow powdering my black sleeves. I watch a nuthatch inspect each branch of a walnut, its sideways hop and dip when it finds a morsel.
Now that I can see the quaking aspens, through bare walnut branches, I can hear them too: their constant whisper. Gauzy rain. A train horn.
Somewhere nearby, the bugling of geese. A red-breasted nuthatch goes up and down each branch of a small walnut. Mosquito: a blur on my nose.
Off to the northeast, a thin band of clear sky for the dawn to tint. A squirrel drops a walnut from the treetops. The catbird starts to mew.
Shirt-sleeve weather. A squirrel unearths a walnut from the yard in that casual way squirrels have of pretending it’s doing something else.
Steady sleet. A squirrel bores into the frozen earth to retrieve a black walnut, then schleps the battered, lumpy thing into the treetops.