A cicada lies on its back on the porch, legs churning the air. I turn it over and the dog gives it a good, close reading with her nose.
cicadas
Backlit by the sun against the dark woods, a swarm of lekking gnats, their Brownian motion now faster, now slower. An annual cicada’s whine.
It’s hot. At last the annual cicadas sound fully charged. The air is alive with tiny insects in non-intersecting orbits back-lit by the sun.
A cicada starts his electric saw and stops. It’s too cold for cicadas. The sky’s a deep blue. A walnut leaf curled like a boat floats down.
In the weak sunlight, only leaves at just the right angle glisten, dully, like the eyes of dead fish. A cicada calls twice and falls silent.
Another quiet morning as the songbirds go through their annual molt. Cicada. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Last night’s rain glistens on the grass.
Hot and humid. A lone 17-year cicada’s uncanny call. Where last night a drunk intruder stumbled in the weeds, a cloud of gnats, hovering.
Even on such a cold morning, a faint hush of crickets. A cicada starts up: less a whine than a loud whisper. The slow chant of a vireo.
First cicada of the day, easing in and trailing off as if mimicking the Doppler effect. A cuckoo’s faint call—never as far as it sounds.
Already too warm by 7:30; the first cicada by 8:00. Before the 19th century, I wonder, how did people interpret its industrial whine?
With the power out, my house seems unnaturally quiet compared to the warble and hum of a humid summer morning. A cicada’s buzzer goes off.
The first bindweed flower has opened low to the ground, its white ear-trumpet pointed toward the rising sun. The whine of a cicada.
Out around 9:00, in time to hear the dog-day cicadas start up. If it weren’t for cicadas, how would we know what the sun sounds like?
Clear sky, 55°F. A cicada and a wood pewee singing at the same time: Sunlight! Shadows! Up in the other house, the phones begin to ring.