Cool and still. The piece of thistledown stuck to a porch post by an invisible thread—small flag of an ephemeral country—barely trembles.
July 2011
July 30, 2011
A carpenter ant carries its mote of wood halfway along the edge of the porch before dropping it over the side. Such fastidious destroyers!
July 29, 2011
This morning it hits me: how silent the woods have become now with most of the migrants done singing their fierce but temporary attachments.
July 28, 2011
Rain. An earwig perches on a tansy flower with its head thrust into one of the yellow buttons, motionless as a toker, empty calipers aloft.
July 27, 2011
Another cool morning. Autumn’s in the air, I say to myself, but it’s really just a cricket chirping in the corner of the garden.
July 26, 2011
A perfect morning, clear and cool. A gray squirrel is biting off small branches and carrying them into the thickest part of the tall locust.
July 25, 2011
Overcast and cool, with the smell of rain. Instead of the crows that woke me at dawn, now ravens are exchanging croaks, one high, one low.
July 24, 2011
Overcast and quiet. A silver-spotted skipper drinks from the bergamot, threading the thin purple tubes with its proboscis and leaning in.
July 23, 2011
Overcast at sunrise, with a cool breeze. A gray catbird in the middle of the gray driveway picks pebbles for the collection in its gizzard.
July 22, 2011
A question mark butterfly lands on the porch and begins tasting the wood. Its wings open, a brown leaf turning back time to fiery autumn.
July 21, 2011
Thanks to the drought, the bracken patch in my yard is browning from the outside in. A wild sunflower beside the path bows toward the east.
July 20, 2011
A rare-for-summer inversion layer: throaty jake-break and tire whine, you sound like winter, that discordant note running under our lives.
July 19, 2011
Too humid for clothes, too buggy for bare skin. An enormous yellow bee-fly circles the tansies once, then zooms over to investigate my ear.
July 18, 2011
Already too warm by 7:30; the first cicada by 8:00. Before the 19th century, I wonder, how did people interpret its industrial whine?