Steady rain—a gloomy sunrise. The big dead maple next to the road has the palest bark, its faces gone blank as masks.
red maple
10/11/2023
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
9/25/2023
A few minutes before sunrise, a crack followed by a crash from just inside the woods. I delude myself that I can detect the type of tree: sounds like a red maple, I’d say. So unlike the way they come into the world—miniature claws already red with autumn.
10/6/2022
Another woods-edge maple has gone red. Bouncing bet still blooms beside the porch, four months on.
7/18/2022
Fifteen hours of off-and-on rain and everything looks greener. The big red maple that just finished dying sheds a chunk of rotten wood.
6/16/2022
Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like a slow motor, summoning her chicks.
6/2/2022
Overcast and cool. A red-bellied woodpecker lands on a rotten maple, witters softly and turns her head, listening for the telltale stirrings of breakfast.
3/6/2022
Robin singing in the rain. It could be April but for the lingering patches of snow and the lack of a blush on the red maples.
2/22/2022
Gray with occasional showers. Distant crows. The face that I can’t unsee in the big red maple trunk with its expression of perpetual dismay.
9/24/2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
6/3/2020
Thunderstorm just past, many leaves on the maple and black cherry trees remain upside-down, like pale, open palms turned toward the sky.
3/24/2020
A gray day. My fever broken, I notice that the red maple down along the woods’ edge that had blossomed too soon two weeks ago is bare again.
5/17/2019
The first, small, maple samaras are spinning down out of the gray sky. I’m startled when one seems to rise: a same-sized insect.
4/17/2019
A blush of blossoms on the ancient red maple, one of my most important teachers when I was young and learning to climb—on branches now gone.