A dear deer, because it’s so hot outside, and I pity it in the heat.
This deer, lying a few feet from my bedroom window, watches me through the grapes and hollies. Its black eyes watch me lying in my cool bed, laptop on my belly.
Things have swung back to some normality. We now have both power and the internet. Every day, for as long as I can bear it, I move my lopper through branch after branch of downed walnut, slipping over yellow fruit as I go. I hatchet through thicker limbs.
So far I’ve regained the side path to my backyard — my backyard, where the walnut was split clean in the middle by a massive tulip poplar that fell on it. The woodpeckers can’t believe their luck.
Now that my lopping has revealed convoluted tree bones, my neighbors tell me what I’ve got is artistic, eco-art. I contemplate saving the money it will cost us to have big stuff removed… Just give the pile a title and let it be… Soltan 2012… No… Sultan 2012. Donald Sultan is a famous artist… I think over the Buddhist metaphysics I was reading last night… Change, the insubstantiality, immateriality, of all seemingly stable things. No shit.