The oaks are twice as naked as they were yesterday. From above the clouds, a single clarinet note that might or might not be a Canada goose.
fall foliage
The tulip tree next to the springhouse is nearly bare, its last few leaves waving like four-fingered cartoon hands as the sky darkens to rain.
Overcast and chilly, with enough of a breeze to make the salmon-colored cherry leaves shiver against an increasingly gray backdrop of woods.
Clear and still. The sun clearing the ridgetop blazes through a new hole in the wall of leaves, lighting up a column of pogoing gnats.
Mizzle: the wet feet of a cloud that slowly settles over the glowing trees, the lone, anxious jay, the clarinet voices of wild geese.
Cloudy but bright. I admire the subtle colors of a jumpseed leaves: green around the veins, yellow-orange bleeding in from the edges.
A warm-for-autumn morning. An east wind drives great flocks of yellow leaves out of the woods. One of last night’s katydids starts up again.
Clear and still. I search the glowing trees for last night’s shapes in the moonlight: the monstrous puma, the opossum playing at death.
A shimmer of moisture in the air, interrupted here and there by an actual raindrop. The roof drips. It’s cold. The lurid colors appall.
Hard rain. My brain feels sluggish, despite coffee. A flash of lightning like the apotheosis of all this yellow.
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.
After a windy night, the whole horizon is visible beyond the trees. I watch one of the last oak leaves float down, rocking, taking its time.
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
First snowfall of the year—a quarter inch. Newly fallen oak leaves roll across it, or scuttle like crabs on their curled lobe-tips.