501
They started in early September with a sputter, a
sound, a pat of an acorn twisting from its cap,
falling from low branches to puff in dust-dry dirt.
With each breath of breeze, two, three broke free and
plummeted earthwards, landing in noisy cracks, splitting
in half, driving themselves toward the ground.
Then six, then ten at a time, panging in deafening bangs
and pops against corrugated roofing, bouncing
twenty feet to wedge themselves against a rock.
Not like last year or the year before, when the oaks,
conserving energy, only pruned small branches that spattered
across the underbrush, a gentle clipping to conserve the larger trunk,
but in a drove, a flock, a flood, the acorns covered roads
with their bones, leaving them to be ground beneath tires, kicked
by walkers’ feet, prodded by jays and woodpeckers until
no room remained for them to fall, and yet they pushed further
into crevices between boulder and bush, gutters and
gate hinges, planter boxes and small spaces of windowsills,
and still they pile themselves as though fall is only fodder
for winter, when the crush of acorns burrow into the damp earth,
then spring, when those cracked shells reach deeper
to draw the life of the soil upward.
