Sunrise stains the western ridge. A squirrel wanders back and forth on an icy snowbank, stirred, no doubt, by the memory of a buried nut.
gray squirrel
A squirrel tunnels into the icy snow. I hear my neighbor walking to his truck a quarter mile away. Inside, all the clocks are blinking.
Sky and ground are the same flat white. I hear my mother at her bird feeder yelling Go! Go! Go! Go! as a squirrel bounds over the icy crust.
Three gray squirrels in a slow-motion chase: this is when they come into heat. The new snow cascades from the branches like wedding veils.
Two squirrels from the gray woods drop into the lilac and leap from branch to branch, disappearing for long moments into its freakish green.
Rain and fog. A squirrel strips water from its head with a lightning-quick motion of its front paws. The dark dead eyestalks of the tansy.
Halfway up the dead cherry beside the porch, a gray squirrel stops and stares, and I recall reading that squirrels are omnivorous as rats.
Just past daybreak, a pileated woodpecker whinnies, a nuthatch tuts, a crow croaks, and a gray squirrel clatters through gray branches.
A harvestman stilting across the porch stops to poke each fallen walnut leaf. Up in the woods, the sudden squirrel rattle that means Hawk.
Walnut at the tip of a bent-down limb: a squirrel gets close, retreats, tries again. Abandons the tree for an oak, tail twitching.
A steady clatter of acorns from a squirrel foraging in the crown of an oak. Could it be dropping them on purpose for later retrieval?
A gray squirrel nibbles on tansy leaves—how odd!—then comes onto the porch and stares at me from two feet away with dark unreadable eyes.
The squirrel is still stealing twigs from the top of the tall black locust. Food? Bedding? I picture the hidden nest: a crown of thorns.
The dawn chorus is quieter now, and at least half-catbird. A squirrel carries a leafy twig through the treetops at sunrise like a flag.