… a large typical owl, hoots its eight hoots late at night from the back of our woods. Over and over, the barred bard makes its haunted sounds.

When I think of the way it looks, this invisible owl, things feel more haunted still. Its flat black predator eyes set in a medieval cowl. Cold and watchful in the dark, my barred owl, with a gray wintry coat and carved talons.

When the owl is silent… That’s when it whirls down from the black oak and picks a rabbit off the ground. Sometimes I hear animals shrieking as they’re taken.

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I spent hours yesterday afternoon lopping and hatcheting out a small secret garden halfway up our hill. I raked grape vines and honeysuckle branches and then carried thick garlands of them into the woods. Who placed these stones just this way? I never saw them before, not under the ivies and ferns. Was it Munro Leaf? Did he write in this garden I’ve let get so overgrown?

As I knelt to pull a few last bits of ivy, an enormous buck appeared a few feet away, wondering what the fuck someone was doing in his woods.

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Early autumn, when the days are mild, Garrett Parkers come out of their houses and clear their gardens of summer growth. The clarity of the air makes us want to clarify what’s going on in our muddled forests.

But mainly we just want to be outside, because this is earthly perfection: Cool sunlight over bronzing dogwood leaves.

Before I started on my garden, I joined my neighbor, Dick Pratt, as he cleared what he called the king’s highway part of his woods, which lie adjacent to ours. He mentioned that the town’s tree expert told him to take down his Norway maples, and I said I’d been told the same thing, and had already begun girdling some of them.

“We girdled a tree a few years ago,” said Dick. “It didn’t care! It grew a new bark.”

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I left a canopy of honeysuckle over the hollow. My garret, furnished with a black wrought iron table and chair, can’t be seen from the house or street. Who knows if I’ll actually write here, hidden from the world, hearing the Brunswick train hoot, and indignant deer stamp their hooves?

I suppose it’s a garden blind too, a place unseen from which to watch unwary hawks and foxes … A blind? A baffle? I’ve looked and I can’t find the name for this. What’s it called? What have I built?

And if, with a little lantern on the table and plenty of repellent on my face, I sit here at night?

It’s too late in the year for fireflies. But the owls are out.