Tansy blooms beside the porch. Black ants and harvestmen wander the allegedly insecticidal leaves; only the yellow flowers remain untouched.
Dave Bonta
Cloudy and cool. Up to its snout in grass, a deer sneezes. The quiet squeaks of a hummingbird circling the beebalm.
On the garlic tops below the porch, the skins are peeling back, burst by the pressure of insurrectionary mobs with wild green hair.
A tussock moth caterpillar dangling in mid-air turns pendulum in the breeze, its silk line visible only as a sliding gleam against the blue.
Dark burgundy leaves on a dame’s-rocket, browning seedheads of dock, the one yellow bracken—autumn is making inroads despite the heat.
The first bindweed flower has opened low to the ground, its white ear-trumpet pointed toward the rising sun. The whine of a cicada.
A phoebe’s spiraling dive ends with an audible snap of its bill. A catbird improvises from the lilac, switching branches after each line.
One tulip tree limb is a-quiver: a pair of squirrels nibble on each other’s fur. Love or parasites? A cricket calls from under the bergamot.
The ornamental cherry’s last leaves are dying. A silent wood thrush watches a tanager so scarlet it throbs in the light-drenched crown.
A rustle from the top of a tall locust: two great blue herons jab at the thorny twigs, spread their wings and launch into the bluest sky.
A small yellow flower lures me down off the porch to find a new species for the yard: fringed loosestrife. Sounds like a biker-chick brawl.
In the deer-ravaged rosebush in the middle of the yard, I spot a bald-faced hornet’s nest, its dark opening fixed on the half-dead cherry.
My mind drifts. At what precise angle of sun, I wonder, does the light lose its magic? I glance over and meet a deer’s unreadable eyes.
A phoebe pecks at the porch roof, then lands in the cherry tree with its feathers puffed out against the cold. The waning moon.