The gibbous moon high overhead gives a ghostly second life to the white snakeroot in the yard, its seedy inflorescences seeming to bloom again. Then an air-braking 18-wheeler bellows for the dawn, and they begin to fade.
white snakeroot
September 14, 2025
Mounds of white snakeroot in the yard glow dimly in the light of a half moon. Orion gets one leg over the ridge before he starts to fade, and the soft calls of migrant thrushes fill the trees.
September 3, 2025
Snakeroot flower heads are beginning to open, white as the cows’ milk that they’re said to poison. A sunbeam reaching the porch shows me the shape of my breath.
September 17, 2024
A white sky only now that the banks of white snakeroot are beginning to fade. In between: green and gold. The drought-struck lilac dying back.
September 4, 2024
Another cold morning. The sun through thin cirrus casts a wan light over the clouds of blossoming snakeroot.
August 26, 2024
A half moon hangs overhead, its light lost to the dawn. A bat makes one last circuit of the yard, where the white tops of snakeroot are beginning to show.
August 11, 2024
Cold and still at sunrise. A hummingbird zooms past, pausing over a snakeroot that is almost in bloom.
January 7, 2024
Gray above, white below: a snowbird hops atop five inches of fresh snow, noshing on goldenrod, snakeroot, and stiltgrass seeds, leaving lines of little arrows pointing backwards.
September 19, 2023
Another cool and quiet autumn morning. The snakeroot has faded to a blowsy brown just as the goldenrod reaches its pinnacle of yellow.
August 27, 2023
Crystal-clear and still. At first light, the soft calls of wood thrushes, no doubt tired and hungry after their all-night flights. Pale crowds of snakeroot seem to glow.
August 22, 2023
A gray squirrel with a nearly white tail scampering up the road draws my attention to the white snakeroot—banks of it just coming into bloom.
September 15, 2022
A high cloud ceiling full of holes. In the meadow, one snakeroot flower nods: hummingbird.
September 3, 2022
As above, so below: white sky, white snakeroot. A hummingbird buzzes in to bother the jewelweed below the porch.
August 20, 2022
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.