June 28

Recently fledged birds look more or less like their parents, except they follow around their mirror image with their mouth open, screeching for tidbits. They do not know the facts of life: do not go into the kitchen; that cat is not your friend; the square of sky behind the house is really glass, and will break your neck, judo-like, with the force of your own vitality. Swing wide past the corner.

Baby woodpeckers

in the parlor and porches:

learning not to die.

June 21

The grass is getting tall now, the wild roses getting higher and pumping out flowers with equal vigor. All around us, hidden animals explode from secret resting places in the vegetation. Grass waves and earth rumbles with the shock of their hooves.

Why are fawns speckled?

Their mothers eat white roses

before they are born.

June 11

Almost the longest day of the year without ever getting light out: a good season for bare-root fruit trees, or sleeping. The hay grasses, prepared to flower, droop to the ground. The scent of multiflora hangs invisible on the trail; sweetbriars that went over the fence a century ago hang illustration-like from old apple trees.

Corgi snuffling.

Rabbit shot from grass cannon.

Too wet to give chase.

May 14

Fragrant and enormously busy orchard. Scent of apples, lilacs, honey-smelling euphorbia. White clouds in the sky, white flecks on the green, green trail—strawberry flowers or blown apple petals: fruit sooner or later. Warblers in four colors and orioles in PennDOT orange, detouring traffic around their work areas.

Bluebird flits from branch

of blossoms to bonsai jin—

dead apples still bear.

May 7

Home improvement is the death of poetry. Youth sports are the death of poetry. Illness is the death of poetry. Day-old ducks are the death of poetry. Kay Ryan was asked if she thought being Poet Laureate would make it more difficult to write. “No,” she said. “I think it will make it impossible.”

Bowls of spider web

like hammocks strung in the grass:

fairy encampment.

April 11

Rainy night. Walls of forest and field slide past the headlights. I drive in and out of sudden pockets of peeper song. The neighbor has cut and burned his hedgerow. A mound of ashes shimmers and winks a hundred golden eyes in the darkness.

Salamander eggs

in the frog pond, but alas—

no mates to man her.

April 7

Spring has returned (again). The fields are bare, the sun warm, the wind feeling its oats. Beneath the crackling of tree branches, the hills and shelves and creeks are visible for a while. The hayfields lie simple and brown and stubbly.

Beagle in sunshine,

sitting beside a deer corpse—

perfect happiness.