Breezy and clear. A deer steps out of the woods, grunting softly to collect her fawn, who comes leaping through the purple pom-poms of dame’s-rocket.
dame’s-rocket
5/29/2023
Memorial Day. The dame’s-rocket lining the driveway is at its height of purple. A hen turkey at the woods’ edge clucks and calls. Summer’s here.
11/7/2021
A scrap of hornets’ gray paper by my chair. Sunlight catches a dead dame’s-rocket below the porch, seed pods reduced to pure gesture.
6/18/2021
High, hazy clouds dilute the sunlight. A chipping sparrow lands sideways on a tall dame’s-rocket stalk, singing as it bows under his weight.
6/1/2021
Sun through thin clouds. Dame’s-rocket in the meadow keeps growing to extend the bloom: a slowly rising, purple mist.
5/23/2021
The dame’s-rocket is at its height; my overgrown front yard is the equal of any garden. The catbird seems to concur.
6/9/2020
Silver-spotted skippers chase over dame’s-rocket. A catbird balancing on a dead weed stalk plucks a green bug from a blade of grass.
5/7/2017
The first dame’s-rocket are coming out: dabs of purple among the banks of winter cress and garlic mustard. Basically, it’s rocket season.
9/18/2015
The rising sun illuminates old spiderwebs in the eaves, littered with insect body parts. Below, the flamboyant bones of dame’s-rocket.
7/8/2015
Autumn has come to the dame’s-rocket in the yard, leaves turning orange and burgundy as the seedpods yellow like needle-thin fingernails.
6/11/2015
Silver-spotted skippers work the last dame’s-rocket, and a day-time cricket begins to chirp. I slap myself in the chest to kill a mosquito.
6/1/2015
The dame’s-rocket in my yard has reached the late baroque stage of flowering, clumps as chubby as cherubs flying out from the main stalks.
5/18/2015
It’s wild mustard season, the yard dotted with purple dame’s-rocket, white garlic mustard, and among the cattails a riot of yellow rocket.
12/19/2013
Dimples stipple the snow below the porch where icicles dripped. Sparrow tracks circle a dame’s-rocket seed-head bent down by the last storm.