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.
Dave Bonta
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.
A rare-for-summer inversion layer: throaty jake-break and tire whine, you sound like winter, that discordant note running under our lives.
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.
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?
It’s tussock moth caterpillar season. One climbs my boot while another thrashes at the end of its silk thread, stuck half-way to the ground.
A Carolina wren swipes its bill back and forth on the end of a dead limb, as if sharpening a knife. A groundhog sneezes in the strong sun.
Whither the thrush whose ethereal notes woke me at dawn? A male towhee flies up to a sunlit branch and takes a shit, singing.
A helicopter alone in the clear sky: the mingled notes of its motor, high and low. A firefly sails past, inner wings glowing in the sun.
The incremental opening of the tansy flowers seems nearly complete. Two of the yellow heads are dotted with small brown shield bugs.
Wind moves in the trees behind the trees, and a small yellow leaf tumbles down from the overcast sky, taking its time to reach the ground.
Half past midnight in the moonlit forest, a cuckoo tried out the screech owl’s call. This morning, just a red-eyed vireo repeating himself.
Goldfinches twitter in the tops of the locusts at sunrise, bright as beacons. A yellow hoverfly watches me from four inches away.
Wood thrush and cardinal song. A male hummingbird chases a silver-spotted skipper off the beebalm, then retreats to a dead branch to preen.