Rabbit

Midfield

Midfield, / attached to nothing, / the skylark singing. — Basho

First snow, first junco tracks.

A spot of clean ground. This is where the rabbit laid while snow fell.

Sapphire sky beneath a sheet of vellum.

The winter sky has netted a colony of ring-billed gulls.

The chill carried a pine siskin to my yard.

Christmas morning. The Carolina wren sings.

At the top of the sweetgum tree, a tail flicks.

Winter: The dogwood blooms with finches.

House finch: Your crown is dried blood.

Northern flicker: You carry the sun under your wings.

All day I saw the Carolina wren. Still, I felt such loneliness.

We’ve been apart for so long that I can finally think of you fondly.

A little boy rides his new toy up and down the street.

One of the juncos drags its long toenails through the snow.

There and then not there: the chickadee.

The blue jays have me surrounded.

Now the blue jays are gone. They’re off mobbing a hawk.

No shadow like a hawk’s shadow.

When I’m with birds, it doesn’t matter that I’m not with people.

The songbirds exit stage right. The Cooper’s hawk enters stage left.

Winter: A great blue heron slips on a frozen marsh.

Today, a man touched me on the arm. I did not know him.

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.

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.

The cowbells follow one another / Into the distances of the afternoon. — James Wright

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 used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water. — Allison Seay

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.