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
7/30/2011
A carpenter ant carries its mote of wood halfway along the edge of the porch before dropping it over the side. Such fastidious destroyers!
7/29/2011
This morning it hits me: how silent the woods have become now with most of the migrants done singing their fierce but temporary attachments.
7/28/2011
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.
7/27/2011
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.
7/26/2011
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.
7/25/2011
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.
7/24/2011
Overcast and quiet. A silver-spotted skipper drinks from the bergamot, threading the thin purple tubes with its proboscis and leaning in.
7/23/2011
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.
7/22/2011
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.
7/21/2011
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.
7/20/2011
A rare-for-summer inversion layer: throaty jake-break and tire whine, you sound like winter, that discordant note running under our lives.
7/19/2011
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.
7/18/2011
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?