Rain like a drunk at a broken piano whose green keys all play the same note. The hornets still hide their hoard in a gray paper sack.
A woodchuck waddles down the road, pausing every few feet to poke its head into the weeds. A fawn bleats up in the laurel. The sun goes in.
A tiger swallowtail is laying eggs on the lilac and black cherry, dabbing each leaf with the tip of her abdomen, wings fighting the breeze.
The dawn chorus is quieter now, and at least half-catbird. A squirrel carries a leafy twig through the treetops at sunrise like a flag.
A little wood satyr—brown butterfly with yellow-rimmed eyespots—lands on the glass door and pivots at the center of its reflection.
Fresh buds have appeared on one of the two wild grape sprigs I planted at the base of the dead cherry. A nuthatch calls in the growing heat.
With the power out, my house seems unnaturally quiet compared to the warble and hum of a humid summer morning. A cicada’s buzzer goes off.
Tansy blooms beside the porch. Black ants and harvestmen wander the allegedly insecticidal leaves; only the yellow flowers remain untouched.
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.