Clear and still. I search the glowing trees for last night’s shapes in the moonlight: the monstrous puma, the opossum playing at death.
fall foliage
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.
Oak leaves that turned brown just a few days ago already rattle instead of rustling. A hunter in gray camouflage emerges from the woods.
A sparrow hawk makes two small, fast circles over the ridge, just like a real hawk. A barberry bush has this year’s only flaming foliage.
Rain again. This is the dreariest, drabbest autumn I’ve ever seen—except for the moss and tree-bark lichens, which have never been brighter.
No frost yet, but the woods’ edge is riddled with fresh chinks of sky. The squeaky rattle of a winter wren as it pops out of the weeds.
Endlessly flitting about the same patch of sun up in the woods, what looks like an enchanted moth must be a leaf caught by caterpillar silk.
The forest is still a-flicker with falling leaves—astonishing this late in the year. Distant church bells. A chipmunk’s agitated ticking.
White sky, bright leaves, shivering on the branch as if in ecstasy. The sine wave of a gray squirrel’s tail and body bounding up the road.