Rain and fog. With the goldenrod going gray, the yellow has moved from the meadow to the woods’ edge: spicebush, walnut, birch, elm, tulip tree.
fall foliage
Sunrise hidden by fog, which only turns a lighter shade of gray. Rain falling from the leaves. Leaves falling from the rain.
A low cloud ceiling gravid with rain. It’s quiet. Every few seconds, another yellow leaf zigzags down.
Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.
Walnut leaves have begun to yellow, as leaf miners turn the locust trees brown. A red-eyed vireo warbles on and on.
An east wind raises fallen leaves and makes them fly. The most aerodynamic ones circle slowly, as if searching for the best resting place.
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.
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.