porcupine

Equinox. I spot some goldenrod, done flowering, turning yellow a second time. My mother stops by to tell me about a singing porcupine.

I haven’t seen a porcupine lately, but who else could be debarking the tulip tree’s lower branches? They glow white against the rainy woods.

Dull yellow stripes in the fog: the rising sun slipping between ridge-top trees; thin tulip poplar branches chewed bare by a porcupine.

The top half of a dead elm behind the house crashes down in the wind. I remember the porcupine in its topmost branch like a crown of thorns.

The bottom half of the porcupine-girdled cherry tree is in bloom; the top is lifeless. You’d think the news would travel from the ground up.

Back below freezing. The word breeze no longer fits the low winds, full of bite and lightly salted with snow.

Just past sunrise, the powerline is a tongue of light off through the woods. A heavy contrail drifts toward the sun like a deepening frown.

I watch a porcupine waddling toward the porch in my camcorder’s small screen, how the spines move as its fat flesh jiggles. Rain on the way.

The ice is all gone, but the cedar next to my side door still leans away from the house at a 30-degree angle, like a giant green erection.

Patter of rain from a leaden sky. Mouth-shaped wounds on the cherry tree where the porcupine chewed it—by far the brightest spots of color.

Last night, I almost stepped on the porcupine—it could barely walk. This morning, on the cherry tree beside the porch, bright yellow wounds.

Gray sky at sunrise. The porcupine is late; I watch it coming from a long way off. It pauses to chew on the porch—no taste like home!

Barely audible over the stream: claws on bark, slow footsteps. A porcupine’s round shadow crosses the yard and squeezes under the porch.

Distant sound of a rasp on wood: the porcupine’s last meal of the night. In the springhouse lawn, the silhouette of a cat taking a shit.