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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.

And within my body, / another body … sings; there is no other body, / it sings, / there is no other world — Jane Hirshfield

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.

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

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.

how you can look back / on a life & see only salt there — Sam Sax

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.

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.

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?