Snow piles up on branches, as if the white sky were descending on a chaos of ladders. Only a woodpecker’s soft tapping breaks the silence.
downy woodpecker
September 10, 2012
A downy woodpecker lands in the dead cherry tree. She trills and the rotten limbs tremble, taps and they make hardly a sound.
June 5, 2012
Wind from a distant storm blows the leaves backwards. In lieu of thunder, a downy woodpecker’s fast rattle on a hollow limb.
April 7, 2012
A downy woodpecker has found a loud limb to hammer. When the din stops, he’s with a female. That brief cloacal kiss that passes for sex.
March 27, 2012
Woodpeckers drumming at sunrise. It occurs to me that they might not be telegraphing “I am here” so much as verifying that the world is.
February 27, 2012
A downy woodpecker gleans breakfast from the dead cherry, chirping between taps. A mackerel sky. The smell of thawed earth.
December 13, 2011
Sun through a skim of clouds. A nuthatch and a downy woodpecker trade anxious, nasal notes between the faint shadows of the trees.
November 19, 2011
Bare ground in the herb bed has risen into spires—a city of frost. A downy woodpecker booms like a pileated on a hollow limb.
November 13, 2011
Mid-morning, and my feet are propped on the rail as usual. A female downy woodpecker lands on my right boot and taps at the worn-down sole.
August 27, 2011
A downy woodpecker lands on the dead elm, his black-and-white feathers against the barkless trunk as startling and dramatic as a totem pole.
August 13, 2011
Darkening sky. A downy woodpecker gleaning breakfast from the dead cherry’s flaking limbs pauses to scratch his face with one fast foot.
February 13, 2011
To the south, the hysterical-sounding whoops of a pileated woodpecker. To the north, the rapid taps of a downy, that tachycardia.
December 26, 2010
So quiet, the downy woodpecker tapping a dead branch sounds as loud as a pile driver. High overhead, the half moon like a big right ear.
July 23, 2010
Highway noise from over the ridge; a whiff of diesel. A downy woodpecker going up the dead elm passes a nuthatch going down.