With the leaves down I can see not only farther, but deeper: through a maze of lilac branches, I spot a rabbit when its dark eye blinks.
lilac
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.
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.
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.
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.
Random lilac, red maple and black cherry leaves have flipped over, exposing their pale undersides—evidence of a downpour in the wee hours.
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.
Even the invaders’ spring is late: barberry, lilac, multiflora rose just now leafing out, the hated myrtle purpling what used to be a lawn.
Hard rain falling into slush, and the fog thickening: cloud into cloud. Buds glow yellow on the lilac where two titmice flit.
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.
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.
A few flakes in the air. A gray squirrel wanders through the lilac branches, scattering a pair of juncos. The squeaky calls of finches.
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.
Two squirrels from the gray woods drop into the lilac and leap from branch to branch, disappearing for long moments into its freakish green.