A large native bee lands on a porch column to groom her antennae. A black ant races back and forth brandishing a dead ant like a flag.
ants
June 10, 2021
Downpour. An ant abandons its dead caterpillar. An earthworm dangles from a cardinal’s bill.
May 10, 2021
The stream is quieter than I would’ve thought after so much rain. The sun comes out, and the one ant tending to a peony bud moves her antennae.
April 28, 2021
Hazy sun. The first catbird pops out of a barberry bush, improvising wildly. An ant traverses my collar.
May 22, 2020
Sky darkening to rain. I realize that the bare soil I’d taken for the spoil heap from some animal’s burrow is in fact a growing ant mound.
May 4, 2020
The sun goes in and it’s cold. But a hummingbird still comes to the flying saucer-shaped feeder, in which rock the bodies of drowned ants.
July 22, 2016
A desiccated earthworm has somehow appeared on the garden walk despite the drought. It twitches, pulled back and forth by gangs of ants.
September 20, 2013
The thin fog turns blue before disappearing. At the woods’ edge, ants rise on filmy wings like a curl of smoke.
June 2, 2013
Rainy and cool. A pair of goldfinches spiral up from the meadow, twittering. I find a dead ant in my last mouthful of coffee.
July 29, 2012
Tiny ants are digging holes in the tansy flowers—yellow eyes with seething black pupils. A single-propeller plane: the sound of a clear day.
May 6, 2012
Cloudy and cool. The small black ants on the peony buds move sluggishly as lovers stunned by charismatic moons.
April 17, 2012
Cool and overcast. The soft thump of a bird side-swiping a window. An ant walks with exquisite slowness up the side of the house.
August 18, 2011
A black ant sways and staggers. A white caterpillar turns and begins to descend the white column, as if finally convinced it’s not a tree.
July 30, 2011
A carpenter ant carries its mote of wood halfway along the edge of the porch before dropping it over the side. Such fastidious destroyers!