Halfway up the hill, a yellow-billed cuckoo is calling over and over, that lyrical coo turning mechanical, relentless. Mosquito in my ear.
August 6, 2010
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.
August 5, 2010
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.
August 4, 2010
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.
August 3, 2010
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.
August 2, 2010
Overcast and cool. I pull a few clumps of stiltgrass and my hand starts to itch—chiggers? The high, strangled calls of a raven.
August 1, 2010
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.
July 31, 2010
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.
July 30, 2010
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.
July 29, 2010
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.
July 28, 2010
A cyanide millipede—black segments edged in orange, yellow cilia undulating—flows through the garden like a dangerous amusement park ride.
July 27, 2010
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.
July 26, 2010
The small cross of a plane against the blue, its distant drone. A flicker climbing the dead elm loses his footing on a patch of sunlight.
The vibrating of a dead branch… July 25, 2010
The vibrating of a dead branch from which a bird has just flown. In a funnel spider web among the weeds, 14 raindrops from the last storm.