The Morning Porch

June 9, 2009

Dave Bonta June 9, 2009

In the tall grass beside the road, two yellow iris—last survivors of that phalanx planted 30 years ago, when we still dreamt of order.

Dave Bonta June 8, 2009

A yellow jacket inspects the spot where the hornet nest I destroyed last week had hung: traces of gray paper in the shape of a rose.

Dave Bonta June 7, 2009

The cerulean warbler sounds rushed as always. A chipmunk watches me for ten minutes, stationed like a sentry on the rock next to the porch.

Dave Bonta June 6, 2009

A mosquito lands her drilling rig on my wrist. Warblers whisper in the treetops. The first peony, beaded with rain, bowing to the blue sky.

Dave Bonta June 5, 2009

Towhee, robin, catbird, great-crested flycatcher: birdsongs sound more vivid in the rain, like jazz solos rising over a surf of applause.

Dave Bonta June 4, 2009

The black cat crouches at the edge of the meadow full of dame’s-rocket. What hides, squirmed into grassy burrows, under all that purple?

Dave Bonta June 3, 2009

Overcast and still. A soft thump up in the woods must be either a body or a piece of tree well into the slow fever of its afterlife.

Dave Bonta June 2, 2009

A passing shower. In the tall weeds of the old corral, the plaintive yelps of a wild turkey hen trying to keep track of her foraging chicks.

Dave Bonta June 1, 2009

I take advantage of the cold (36F) to destroy a yellow jacket nest above my head, crushing the queen and her paper castle with a sponge mop.

Dave Bonta May 31, 2009 1

A squirrel running on the roof above my head: the rhythm of hoofbeats in the paintings of horses from when they were still thought to bound.

Dave Bonta May 30, 2009

A chipmunk appears on the flat stone beside the porch and stares at me as I hum Shostokovich, its cheeks bulged wide as Dizzy Gillespie’s.

Dave Bonta May 29, 2009

After decades of segregation by color, the irises in my garden seem to have interbred: beside the porch, yellow petals with purple wings.

Dave Bonta May 28, 2009

Pale bones of the dead elm, standing at the edge of the yard like an emissary from Lent amidst a Mardi Gras of green, reach into fog.

Dave Bonta May 27, 2009

Fog. The ants who tend the peony buds have been replaced by drops of water—all but one, who moves slow as an astronaut on a strange planet.