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
6/10/2021
Downpour. An ant abandons its dead caterpillar. An earthworm dangles from a cardinal’s bill.
5/10/2021
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.
4/28/2021
Hazy sun. The first catbird pops out of a barberry bush, improvising wildly. An ant traverses my collar.
5/22/2020
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.
5/4/2020
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.
7/22/2016
A desiccated earthworm has somehow appeared on the garden walk despite the drought. It twitches, pulled back and forth by gangs of ants.
9/20/2013
The thin fog turns blue before disappearing. At the woods’ edge, ants rise on filmy wings like a curl of smoke.
6/2/2013
Rainy and cool. A pair of goldfinches spiral up from the meadow, twittering. I find a dead ant in my last mouthful of coffee.
7/29/2012
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.
5/6/2012
Cloudy and cool. The small black ants on the peony buds move sluggishly as lovers stunned by charismatic moons.
4/17/2012
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.
8/18/2011
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.
7/30/2011
A carpenter ant carries its mote of wood halfway along the edge of the porch before dropping it over the side. Such fastidious destroyers!