Humid but blessedly cool; the air’s alive with birdsong and slow-moving insects. Rabbits chase and graze among half-grown bracken.
bracken
Drizzle thickening now and then into proper rain. The bracken in my yard glows in all the colors of decline and fall.
In the flat light of a cloudy morning, bracken fronds glow like the sun-bleached rib cages of seraphim—skeletons gone rococo.
Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.
This year for the first time deer have not eaten all the bracken in my yard. One frond is already yellowing like the skeleton of some unlikely fish.
A spicebush swallowtail careens through the yard, where bracken fronds nod in three directions. A downy woodpecker upside-down on a limb.
Light rain. The bracken in the yard have replaced the fronds they lost in the late frost, but they have a hurried, bunched appearance.
The warmest morning in weeks. The bracken in my yard that the deer mowed down has raised defiant fists. A red-eyed vireo drones on and on.
The brackens in my yard have turned from brown to burgundy. High in a walnut tree, a squirrel checks every webworm tent for unfallen nuts.
Bracken ferns in the yard crowd together as if trying to hide from the sun. A cerulean warbler like a small power saw stuttering to life.
Thanks to the drought, the bracken patch in my yard is browning from the outside in. A wild sunflower beside the path bows toward the east.
Dead bracken leaf: a sun-bleached carcass. A feral cat pads down the road undetected by squirrels, its sodden gray coat the color of gravel.
Dark burgundy leaves on a dame’s-rocket, browning seedheads of dock, the one yellow bracken—autumn is making inroads despite the heat.