For an hour or so about midnight, the air was filled with the smell of skunk. The pungent odor seldom endures so long. This has led me to suspect that this particular specimen of genus Mephitis might have met an untimely end beneath the wheels of some passing vehicle on a nearby road. If not, then it certainly indulged in a veritable orgy of exudation, and I pity whatever beast was the target of its wrath.
The night cooled quickly, and a bit of wind stirred the trees, but most encouraging was the formation of clouds. Though they have not lingered in any great density, their presence brought me delight, not least because they appeared while the moon was yet high, and for several hours caught its limpid light in folds and rumples, decorating the sky with a luminous, motile tapestry.
Late, when the air had fallen still and chill had silenced the katydids, the serenity cracked and rustled when a pine cone fell what sounded to be the full height of a tall tree, snapping twigs all the way, thudding at last onto pliant lawn. It is the first I've heard this season. Soon there will be more, and then the acorns too will fall. The year changes, and I am glad.
Sunday Verse
Wild Sunflower
by Yvor Winters
Sunflower! gross of leaf and porous,
gummy, raw,
with unclean edges,
fury
of the broken but unbeaten
earth, it leers
beside our door!
Grip
hard to the dry
airy logs, scoured
clean with sun. Hold fast
to what you are, in spite of
the wormseething loam,
the boiling land. And give
me love, slow love
that draws the turgid
loam up to the sun!
But
fiercely this thing
grows, is hairy, is
unfinished at the edges,
gulps the sun and earth, will
not be beaten
down nor turn away.