Unlike last night’s full moon, even this dim smudge of a sun is painful to look at. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling a black walnut.
gray squirrel
A squirrel hurls itself from maple to locust, falling, grabbing hold. It runs to the end of a limb and stops, staring across at the walnut.
Moon in the morning sky like a broken plate. Squirrels are climbing walnut trees and descending with fat green globes between their teeth.
The clouds thicken, gravid with rain. A squirrel climbing the walnut tree next to the road pauses on the first limb to lick its genitals.
A squirrel on the lowest branch of the walnut tree next to the road scolds something hidden in the goldenrod, shaking with each harsh cry.
In the half-light of dawn, white snakeroot glowing in the meadow, the unending shhhhh of tree crickets, clatter of a squirrel venturing out.
The leaves of the tall tulip tree at the wood’s edge are now as big as babies’ ears. A squirrel cries plaintively from its crown.
A squirrel climbs to the top of a black cherry tree, samples a budding leaf and dashes back down. The aspens wear a new, gray-green fur.
Soft light filtered by a film of cloud. A squirrel carrying a freshly exhumed walnut bounds under the broken dog statue and into the lilac.
That fast-typewriter sound of squirrels chasing each other around the bole of a big black locust. An hour later, they’re still at it.
Sunny and warm. A squirrel crossing the old corral with a disinterred walnut in its mouth follows the shadow of an oak tree into the woods.
A squirrel climbs the elm with a mouthful of dried leaves, goes into the old flicker hole and turns to face out, ready for other contenders.
A rattle of sleet gives way to the hush of snow, then the tapping of freezing rain, then back to snow. A squirrel never stops its scolding.
A squirrel’s scolding echoes off the hillside, with the same, semi-automatic and hysterical qualities of any rant against the powerful.