Peony leaves shriveling from drought even as their antique, cream-white heads still bloom. Ashen skies. A Cooper’s hawk skims the treetops without setting off a single squirrel.
Clear—or what passes for it these days—and cold. The black digger wasp I last saw at dusk hasn’t moved from her spot on the porch column.
A bleary, bloodshot sun in an ash-white sky. Pileated woodpeckers foraging just inside the woods’ edge cackle like sacred clowns.
Cool with thin clouds. Two wood thrushes fly into the woods, dead grass trailing from the leader’s beak. A chipmunk runs under my chair.
Raininess without rain. The peonies remain unbowed. Half-grown bracken fronds in my thin-soiled yard are already turning yellow.
Fire sirens wailing through the gap. A hummingbird comes to the spray from my garden hose, his gorget redder than any flower.
The appeal of a cool, clear morning is beginning to wear as thin as the splay of browning daffodil leaves below the porch. I lapse into fantasies of fog and rain.
Today instead of the usual quickie here I wrote a proper Morning Porch poem over at the ol’ Via. Bon appetit.
Cloudless and cool. Craneflies drift through shafts of sun like angels with spider legs, as the afterimages from a night of terrifying dreams fade from view.
Memorial Day. The dame’s-rocket lining the driveway is at its height of purple. A hen turkey at the woods’ edge clucks and calls. Summer’s here.
Filmy-winged insects drift through rays of sun. A wood thrush comes out into the meadow, hopping like a robin along the edge of the drive.
Another clear, cold morning with little dew. Goldfinches gad about in the tops of the locusts, seemingly oblivious to other birds’ territorial obsessions.
Cold and clear 40 minutes before sunrise. A shadow flutters in beside the porch and begins to shriek: whippoorwill. When he finally stops, the meadow is alive with twittering.
Cold and clear. An Acadian flycatcher gleans breakfast from the undersides of leaves, among the green dreadlocks of a blossoming walnut.