Phoebes mate in the rain, their thin branch bobbing as they touch tails. I crush a slow flood-water mosquito with a clap of my hands.
Plummer’s Hollow
The walnut tree beside the road is in bloom—long green catkins like fringes on antique lampshades. A least skipper flits through the meadow.
Rain. A red-spotted purple lands on the top rail and spreads its dark wings like a damp umbrella. A jumping spider shelters under my foot.
In a lull between showers, the sideways shimmy of birch and black cherry leaves. One of the neighbors’ hens begins to screech.
A silver-spotted skipper flies back and forth in front of the porch a dozen times. A grackle comes in croaking for a drink from the creek.
I take my eye off the clear sky for a moment and suddenly there are clouds—four streaks beside the moon’s thin frown. Cerulean warbler song.
At the woods’ edge, three yellow hats: iris gone feral. A hummingbird rockets back and forth through the lilac, showing off for a female.
Exotic dancers of the Lepidoptera have names like Little Wood Satyr and Pearl Crescent. Their underwings bear black suns and crescent moons.
Despite the heat, the oriole’s enthusiasm is undiminished. The walking onions, like ostriches of fable, are stretching to bury their heads.
A large leaf-footed bug stalks up and down a porch column, its shadow at its side. Two carpenter bees clash like airborne sumo wrestlers.
The delicate sneezes of a deer grazing on the thorny canes of multiflora rose bushes. She stretches a hind leg up to rub her nose.
Warm and hazy. The yard buzzes with native bees pollinating the alien, invasive myrtle. Off in the woods, the glint of old glass.
The crackle of a grackle. The boosterism of a rooster. The incessant cheer of a vireo. My ears take refuge in the creek, that labile Babel.
Sun! A gray squirrel noshes on black walnut catkins, then drops deliberately to a thin locust branch five feet below and clings, see-sawing.