cattails

A trembling in the cattails: female yellowthroat. Birds flit through the treetops, smaller than the motes of grit in my ancient binoculars.

Leaves blow backward, signalling storms to come. Fallen crabapple petals litter the ground between the cattails like bloody thumbprints.

The phoebe sings lustily for the first time in days, hawking flies on the sunny side of the barn. Bits of cattail down rise from the marsh.

Fragments of sky are still visible behind the haze of new leaves. The cattails are shedding; tufts of down drift by. That Sunday silence.

Cool air, bright sun and silence, save for the rustling of cattails and the creaking of one dead oak cradled in the limbs of its neighbor.

Clear and bracing, like a shot of vodka. The thirteen cattail heads beside the springhouse sway gently in the dawn light.

Juncos hop on the icy snow between the cattails where a rabbit disappeared fifteen minutes earlier, taking the darkness with it.

The cattails’ broken blades are white with rime. Two juncos flutter up under the springhouse eaves, investigating the empty phoebe nest.

Halfway to the ground, a locust leaf reverses course and heads for the sky. The cattails whisper, a restive crowd, but the sun never comes.

The downpour eases, and the cattail leaves stop dancing. A burst of bird calls from within the dogwood thicket: waxwings, towhees.

In the springhouse marsh, 13 cattail spikes are turning brown. When I go over for a closer look, a deer pops her head up, swivels her ears.

In the light breeze, one clump of cattails waves out of sync; the sound of chewing. A few perfunctory phrases from a red-eyed vireo.

Beside the springhouse, the twittering zoom of a hummingbird’s courtship dive: from sunlight into cattail shadows and back. Tanager song.

The moon comes out, and there’s the rabbit, crouching next to the lilac. It races across the driveway and disappears into the cattails.