Ephemera

Human Contact

I saw a sign that read, “Ring Bell for Human Contact.” I did not ring the bell.

When shade turns to sun, dark-eyed juncos are the first to emerge from the brush.

After several dark days, the sun coming through this window might as well be a god.

When I was filling the birdbath, a blue jay did his best impression of a red-tailed hawk. I think he wanted to bathe all by himself.

The male cardinal is a grace note in the bare rose of Sharon.

A highway runs through one of our wetland areas. Shame on us.

A shadow crosses the highway. Above, a red-tailed hawk.

You know you’re going to die, and you live anyway. That’s how it is.

I have edited the landscape to include more detritus.

The last leaves on the crabapple tree: ornaments.

I only answered the door because I thought you were a bird.

Unordered list: waxing crescent moon, bare maple tree, dull opal sky.

The remaining leaves sound like dry grasses.

Black Friday. I can’t get to the wetlands fast enough.

The snow geese fly in the shape of a swallow.

Scatter my ashes in the prairie cordgrass.

Four red-tailed hawks soar above our subdivision.

Starlings carry the shape of power lines into the air.

Death won’t happen to me. I won’t be there. – Jose Faus

Secretive Nature

I want to upcycle Congress into an old-growth forest.

My bird name would be the beaver-toothed ruminator.

I’m pretty sure the geese don’t call this place Kansas.

Starlings perch on power lines above the trainyard.

I just read about a type of sparrow that has a “secretive nature.” Intriguing.

One squirrel munches on an acorn while the others kuk and quaa over a Cooper’s hawk.

The great horned owl is out hunting on our street today. Between him and the Cooper’s hawk, the crows and blue jays are raising a racket.

Today, I saw the sparrow described as having a “secretive nature.” What a beauty.

I’m just here for the beauty.

No killdeer across the street. For now, the new development has won.

The recycling truck’s brakes sing like a forlorn bird.

One of the functions of language is to facilitate the creation of memories. Once we have memory, we have a past and a presumed future.

Language is not how we experience the world. It’s how we editorialize about our experiences.

As soon as I say “hawk,” I am no longer experiencing the hawk.

There’s a lot of goose poo on my shoe. I don’t know what to do.

Yesterday, I followed a kestrel through a small field.

Talk about theories all you like, but when it rains, go outside.

In place of leaves, red-winged blackbirds.

The pied-billed grebe’s white stomach shimmers like an ostrich egg.

Erratics

I love the maple more because of the cardinal, and I love the cardinal more because of the maple.

Black cattle rise from the ground like basalt erratics in a limestone world.

You do feel alive. You just don’t like how that feels.

What is an extra hour in sky-time?

It’s as if the entire red maple has become the female cardinal, a form of reverse camouflage.

Dropping conditioning is, in itself, a form of conditioning.

Shhh. The squirrels are napping.

Water that reflects the sky is full of sky.

The juncos are wonderful company this time of year.

My love of birds started years ago when I released a starling from my father’s trap.

I came home to a Cooper’s hawk perched on my fence.

I think it was a sharp-shinned hawk. And I think a blue jay imitated the alarm cry of a Cooper’s hawk when the sharp-shinned hawk arrived. (Update: This accipiter was later identified as a very young female Cooper’s hawk, so the blue jay used the right call after all.)

Two great horned owls appear to be competing for territory in our neighborhood.

These days with birds are magical.

I woke to ice in the birdbath and a mantle of apricot leaves in the still-green lawn.

I topped the birdbath off with water that wasn’t frozen. Within minutes, dozens of birds came to get a drink or take a bath.

I live between two flyways, so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on here birdwise.

I just saw a yellow-bellied sapsucker in our backyard. A downy woodpecker and a red-bellied woodpecker were back there, too.

I’m ready for my arms to serve as branches.

My neighbor is walking down the street with a large shamanic drum.

Every night, the sky turns into a stigmatic, bleeding from sudden wounds.

The birds have entered my dreams, pale and wandering.

Red Birds

Church bells, and two mourning doves flying toward them.

These birds are using me for my birdbath.

A blue jay flew up to my kitchen window and looked at me as if to say, Do you want your life to be wild, or do you want it to be precious?

I am a screen for the shadows of birds.

The birds are the sky’s shadow puppets.

Now a butterfly is at my window. And a stink bug.

On Nextdoor, my neighbors are trying to pair monarch caterpillars with the milkweed plants they need to survive.

Today is a long drive behind a garbage truck.

I am thankful for trees, which provide homes for so many animals.

On the water, twisted leaves look like origami swans.

Fall: An American white pelican circles a small lake in Kansas.

Nostalgia: missing the bald eagles I saw yesterday.

My fingers are still purple from cutting fresh beets.

I love a red bird on a brown fence.

It’s enough to hear the songbird. I don’t turn my head.

Earlier, I saw an old man carrying a large stuffed dog. I like your dog, I said. Don’t touch him, he replied.

Suffering is a dwelling with a large doorway but very little interior space.

The female cardinal is the color of the red maple’s turning leaves.

Ordinary Birds

I am fascinated by ordinary birds.

All afternoon, two downy woodpeckers danced up and down the sweet gum tree.

Sprinklers have dressed the trees in dark skirts.

Jealousy: when the red-bellied woodpecker is in my neighbor’s yard, not mine.

Killdeers alight between two partially constructed mansions. For now, this land is still theirs.

Like the blind raccoon, I am afraid of wind, high grass, birds, and snow.

As I turned toward it, the light seemed to be a solid.

A squirrel and I startle one another.

I’ll watch the birds you ignore.

An American kestrel sits alone on a power line. It begins to rain.

Symmetry: six mourning doves evenly spaced on a neighbor’s cable line.

Dirt is my personal stylist.

Grebes float on the man-made lake as the sky drifts into night.

We all have to love something. Why not the cecropia moth?

Overhead, birds break like pool balls.

Poor vision turns fall leaves into cardinals.

Above, the turkey vulture looks like a scalloped black slip.

Sewage Creek

I came home to a downy woodpecker, a chipmunk, and a baby bunny. They were all in the yard together.

Walking leaf, you don’t look like the trees in these parts.

Praying mantis, I see you’ve come to my window again tonight.

I was offered a gondola ride on sewage creek. I said no.

Weeds teach me about the wind.

Daylily, how many fragile ribs guard your seeds?

Fall: Leaves flutter in our sentences.

Rain has turned the sweetgum bark tobacco brown.

My friend is standing in a field painting animals.

That perfect time in the garden when everything is dying but nothing is dead.

Lawn moths are the angels of this abandoned prayer labyrinth.

At the old golf course, two kestrels hunt for grasshoppers.

October: The old crabapple’s leaves are dipped in red wine.

Little blue heron, the lake has made a shimmering replica of you.

Night: We move toads off the road so they won’t get run over.

Beneath the harvest moon, the syncopated call of a great horned owl.

In their appliquéd ballgowns, late-blooming azaleas wait for suitors who never arrive.

Pollinators

Atop his favorite granite stone, my dearest chipmunk surveys his territory. There’s time to take it all in before the rain falls.

The rain is loosening the leaves from my red maple. What will I shed today?

I’m a fool like all the others: I follow the light.

Mine is also a life of enchantment.

Together, we are a different organism.

We stand looking at this root, and this root is fire.

The squirrel who has been nursing eats an acorn on my hammock.

A chipmunk uses railroad ties as a superhighway.

A shower of acorns. Look up! Two squirrels roughhouse in the old oak tree.

I am not alone. The cricket is here. The praying mantis is here. The chipmunk. The woodpecker. Two hummingbirds. And more. And more.

Moths are pollinators, too.

Someday, I will learn how to live. Until then, I will learn about life from the plants and animals in my backyard.

Did you know plants have memories? They learn how to not be afraid. They retain that information. If the Mimosa pudica can do it, so can I.

Mimosa pudica is also known as the sensitive plant, the shy plant, the touch-me-not plant. We could learn a lot from each other.

I saw the hawk flying low today, then high, a shadow traversing my neighbor’s roof.

Moon-Suns

The air is screaming, Hawk! Hawk! Hawk!

Hay bales settle into the shorn field.

I’ve been lost in a world of tiny mushrooms and painted lady butterflies.

Stained glass insect. Little windows in the air.

I want words to be smaller. I want to see the sky.

The sun, obscured by the moon, took on the shape of a moon. A confetti of moon-suns fell at my feet.

I will remember what I heard more than what I saw: hundreds of cicadas flexing their tymbals in the false-dark day.

And the one dying at my feet as we entered near totality.

I will remember silent streets and still air, charcoaled sky, the amber of streetlights.

I will remember any or all of this. Or none of it.

That old question surfaced: What matters?

I still don’t know. But here I am, with eyes.

Who am I without the barn swallows?

Tack Coat

The tack coat of dawn gives way to the scumble of morning.

Dawn. Hot pink rubbed over midnight blue. Sudden lightning. My dog in my arms, trembling.

A rabbit appears out of nowhere like a lost thought. I think of an old friend.

Some folks decorate their porches but never sit on them.

Little man down there putting away your grill, come out of your garage and look up.

Some people kill birds. Others put out bird feeders.

Tonight’s sunset turned the sky into a cauldron. Below, a thrasher the color of depleted soil foraged quietly beneath a sapling.

Birds define the air.

How do you see the air without the bird? Assume there are no trees.

In the sky, a great heron goes unnoticed by lovers on a picnic.

A tender young boy watches a pair of red-winged blackbirds as his friends taunt him.

A scissor-tailed flycatcher perches on a stop sign until I get too close with my camera.

The verses are in the land, in the trees before they became paper, in our hearts before they were rewritten by language.

I just saw a man texting while driving a tractor down a major thoroughfare.

I might be getting too involved with the animals who live in my yard.

Nobler Animals

The bird you can hear is the one who has the sweetest song.

Earlier, I saw a heron flying and thought it was a ship slicing the air.

American goldfinch, drop of sun.

The birds give voice to the trees.

Two ravens ink the air.

How small the bird. How vast the sky.

After the rain, a house finch bathes in a pothole.

The sky lives through the birds.

Wet swallow, who destroyed your nest on this stormy day?

Swallows, turn my home into your nest. I am only here with your permission.

The barn swallow’s body is a sunset within the sunset.

Neighbor, how can you walk with your head down on this beautiful night?

One swallow, it seems, is having more fun in the air than all the rest.

Sweet robin, I didn’t see you there. But I heard your song.

I’ve had nobler animals in my life than humans.

Starling, that’s a window, not a way through.

When you clear the land, you must confront the sky.

Landscapers, what have you come to destroy?