Yellow stained-glass wings of a tiger swallowtail circling the shadowed yard. The smell of cowshit wafts up from Sinking Valley.
Dave Bonta
Cool, clear and quiet—a silence that’s part Sunday and part molting season. The Canada thistles too are shedding white fur into the breeze.
Halfway up the hill, a yellow-billed cuckoo is calling over and over, that lyrical coo turning mechanical, relentless. Mosquito in my ear.
A wood pewee snaps an insect out of the air, lands and sings, his mournful notes the only thing audible over my uncle’s banjo.
A tussock moth caterpillar climbs halfway up the white porch column, turns and heads back down. The sky goes gray as if it means to rain.
A bald-faced hornet hovers an inch away from my jeans. When I shoo her off, her long legs brush the back of my hand, soft as an eyelash.
The squirrel is still stealing twigs from the top of the tall black locust. Food? Bedding? I picture the hidden nest: a crown of thorns.
Overcast and cool. I pull a few clumps of stiltgrass and my hand starts to itch—chiggers? The high, strangled calls of a raven.
Like a maple key out of season, but far lighter, it spirals ever so slowly down onto the porch floor: a small white moth’s hind wing.
At 52 degrees, hornets are already going in and out of their gray globe in the weeds. I watch the sunrise by inference on the western ridge.
At last the garden cricket has a rival. They creak slowly back and forth. I scan the western sky for what’s left of last night’s moon.
It starts to rain. A hover fly lands on the rim of my mug, its thin, yellow-banded abdomen twitching like a nervous and anorexic bee.
A cyanide millipede—black segments edged in orange, yellow cilia undulating—flows through the garden like a dangerous amusement park ride.
In the springhouse marsh, 13 cattail spikes are turning brown. When I go over for a closer look, a deer pops her head up, swivels her ears.