Plummer’s Hollow

May 25, 2011

Dave Bonta May 25, 2011 1

Coffee in my left hand, I weed the herb bed with my right, muttering at the clover: out with you, foul sweetener! as my fingers turn black.

Dave Bonta May 24, 2011 1

The first irises have opened in the night, some with red and yellow tongues, some with violet, sampling the morning air.

Dave Bonta May 23, 2011 1

Overcast and damp. The yellow centers of fleabane flowers, closed for the night, are beginning to peek through their spiralled white lashes.

Dave Bonta May 22, 2011 2

While the catbird warbles jazz, a chipmunk skitters to a halt on the rock wall, sits back on its haunches and scratches its crotch.

Dave Bonta May 21, 2011 1

A breeze stirs the tulip tree from top to bottom, its four-fingered mitts rocking, cautious as the queen of England’s white-gloved wave.

Dave Bonta May 20, 2011 5

Each glaucous leaf of the bleeding-heart has rolled its rain into one fat bead. I’m wondering: where have all the wood thrushes gone?

Dave Bonta May 19, 2011 3

Phoebe in the barnyard, pewee in the woods. What is it about cleared land that turns a lilting refrain into a burden, a shrill work song?

Dave Bonta May 18, 2011 9

A light drizzle. The one green leaf at the end of a branch on the otherwise dead cherry shakes itself dry and turns back into a hummingbird.

Dave Bonta May 17, 2011 8

The brown mountain of two weeks ago is now astonishingly green. Nothing I saw abroad holds a candle to this view, with its scarlet tanager.

Dave Bonta April 30, 2011 4

The French lilac, backlit by the sun, shimmers like a bright green sail against the still-open woods. A field sparrow’s rising trill.

*

This will be the last new update until May 17th; I’m off to the U.K. to give a poetry reading and visit friends.