Field Notes: Worcester County, October
What seeds itself without my intervention: goldenrod, wood asters, Deptford pinks revealed when storms blow dead leaves west.
A maple pruned to privilege power lines is a blazing hoop.
Mushrooms — fleshy, vaguely obscene — increase. As if in gentle reprimand, the clouds aligned perfectly between two trees dissolve on the sky’s warm tongue.
When the oak’s temporary umber unblurs, the burning bush concentrates its efforts.
I mistake a legless, lifeless katydid in the mailbox for a leaf. Then mistake a leaf for a bird scaling the afternoon.
Salmon dahlias frame an old woman. She says, Where is the son? You alone now?
Some oak leaves fall with an axe’s finality.
Condensed chirruping of little-eyed sparrows, unseen and indignant, interrupts the wind. A coyote ate my friend’s cat, he says.
On a handspan of moss: one perfect toadstool, one gray squirrel, decaying.
Rain arranges milkweed floss in neat rows on grass. A birdseye pattern of flattened shuttlecocks, all pointing east.
The pruned maple reverts to a broken pitchfork. Bees scrape calendula, turtlehead, cosmos.
Sunset: bronze ferrule secures pines on the ridge. Sfumato leaf smell.
Goldenrod and wood aster snow lands, with exquisite delicacy, on sage and thyme, subduing their green only slightly.
Another dense fog, a slow veil over successive planes of view. Clammy, muffling. How weather can strange a place.
Black coins stamped on fallen maple leaves, like plague marks or imprimaturs.
Skeleton worship. Still no hard frost.