The porch in my absence has become a home to hornets. They’re up at dawn, dozens inspecting the surface of their great paper death star.
bald-faced hornet
7/7/2016
As clouds thin, the breeze turns hot. A pile of tailings under the bottom rail where the bald-faced hornet mines pulp for her paper house.
6/29/2016
On the underside of a porch railing, a hornet gathers a mouthful of wood. A small yellow leaf caught in a spiderweb twirls in the wind.
10/17/2012
A bald-faced hornet nest hangs abandoned from the top of a birch. The sun finds a new hole in the forest and blinds me as it tops the ridge.
8/14/2011
The storm just past, a bald-faced hornet flies back and forth over the flattened stiltgrass. The crickets pick up where they left off.
3/13/2011
On the flattened grass where snow has sat for months, the gray disk of an old hornet nest. The feral cat presses her belly fur to the earth.
8/20/2010
The tall goldenrod’s budding tops continue to expand, extending new arms. I find a penny in my pocket and fling it at the hornets’ nest.
8/4/2010
A bald-faced hornet hovers an inch away from my jeans. When I shoo her off, her long legs brush the back of my hand, soft as an eyelash.
7/31/2010
At 52 degrees, hornets are already going in and out of their gray globe in the weeds. I watch the sunrise by inference on the western ridge.
7/20/2010
Rain like a drunk at a broken piano whose green keys all play the same note. The hornets still hide their hoard in a gray paper sack.
7/2/2010
In the deer-ravaged rosebush in the middle of the yard, I spot a bald-faced hornet’s nest, its dark opening fixed on the half-dead cherry.
6/6/2010
A bald-faced hornet lands on a dead cherry limb, chews and fills her mandibles with wood. Somewhere another tree is growing a paper fruit.