A squirrel descends an oak at high speed while rolicking robin music plays in the background. Closeup on the maple buds round as stoplights.
red maple
Small rain on an east wind. Swelling buds impart a faint red hue to the woods’ edge, and a song sparrow states the obvious: spring is here.
Gray sky. A gray breast feather floats down and lands on the snow. Ten minutes later, a sharp-shinned hawk appears in the big maple.
How does the poison ivy know to turn the same salmon as the red maple it has infiltrated? A phoebe chases a kinglet from the roadside weeds.
From the luminous green wall of the woods, a pewee calls. Maple keys come spinning, take the place of yesterday’s hailstones on the porch.
A scarlet bough at the woods’ edge: I peer through binoculars at the first red maple keys. Deer straggle by in their ragged spring coats.
Clear, clear, clear: say the same thing often enough, the cardinal knows, and one day you’ll be right. The east is red with maple blossoms.
Overcast and cold. Ten feet up the trunk of the big maple, a fox squirrel drinks sap from a slit the woodpeckers have widened.
Overnight, two maples on the far side of the road have begun to go orange. And between me and them, a small pale spider with her tiny prey.
Dark morning. The fox squirrel’s tail flickers orange from the back of the big red maple whose buds have swollen into dime-sized stoplights.
Jurassic silhouettes of wild turkeys against the brown and green field. A cold rain. Maple blossoms glow orange and scarlet in the woods.