Another warm morning. A Carolina wren pops out of the bridal wreath bush like a rabbit from a magician’s hat and ascends the lilac, singing.
lilac
October 21, 2011
In the cold drizzle, a kinglet hovers over the faded lilac leaves, hawking prey too small to see. Then it, too, vanishes into the gloom.
August 5, 2011
Humid, yet still so dry that the lilac leaves hang limply. In my last dream before waking, I couldn’t find the exit from an endless mall.
June 20, 2011
Gone for just two days, I come home to find half the lilac crushed by a fallen limb from the dead elm. A phoebe already uses it as a perch.
May 27, 2011
Random lilac, red maple and black cherry leaves have flipped over, exposing their pale undersides—evidence of a downpour in the wee hours.
April 30, 2011
The French lilac, backlit by the sun, shimmers like a bright green sail against the still-open woods. A field sparrow’s rising trill.
*
This will be the last new update until May 17th; I’m off to the U.K. to give a poetry reading and visit friends.
April 21, 2011
Even the invaders’ spring is late: barberry, lilac, multiflora rose just now leafing out, the hated myrtle purpling what used to be a lawn.
March 10, 2011
Hard rain falling into slush, and the fog thickening: cloud into cloud. Buds glow yellow on the lilac where two titmice flit.
January 21, 2011
Juncos fill the lilac, nearest cover to an unfrozen section of stream. Five or six at a time they flutter down to drink from the dark water.
January 13, 2011
The wind has scoured the branches clean, but the old concrete dog standing at point in the shelter of the lilac still wears a coat of snow.
December 25, 2010
A few flakes in the air. A gray squirrel wanders through the lilac branches, scattering a pair of juncos. The squeaky calls of finches.
November 18, 2010
Somewhere above the clouds, a military jet heads north: a gray sound on a gray day. In the newly bare lilac, yellow wires of bindweed.
November 9, 2010
Two squirrels from the gray woods drop into the lilac and leap from branch to branch, disappearing for long moments into its freakish green.
October 23, 2010
Mid-morning: the first patch of blue, little larger than a moon. In the old lilac below the other house, a Carolina wren bursts into song.