Sunny and breezy, but still damp from a shower at dawn. A carpenter ant wanders across the arm of my wooden chair, tapping with her antennae as if taking its measure.
ants
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.
Downpour. An ant abandons its dead caterpillar. An earthworm dangles from a cardinal’s bill.
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.
Hazy sun. The first catbird pops out of a barberry bush, improvising wildly. An ant traverses my collar.
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.
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.
A desiccated earthworm has somehow appeared on the garden walk despite the drought. It twitches, pulled back and forth by gangs of ants.
The thin fog turns blue before disappearing. At the woods’ edge, ants rise on filmy wings like a curl of smoke.
Rainy and cool. A pair of goldfinches spiral up from the meadow, twittering. I find a dead ant in my last mouthful of coffee.
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.
Cloudy and cool. The small black ants on the peony buds move sluggishly as lovers stunned by charismatic moons.
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.
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.