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.
dame’s-rocket
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.
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.
The chickadee flies in with food and flies out with a fecal sac. In the meadow, yellow iris like a tour group in a crowd of dame’s-rocket.
Next to the old dog statue, the sun catches one of the last dame’s-rocket blossoms—a faded purple footnote to a once extensive text.
Below the porch, a dot of pink: a very late dame’s-rocket blooming the day after a hard frost. A brown creeper inspects a small walnut tree.
Dark burgundy leaves on a dame’s-rocket, browning seedheads of dock, the one yellow bracken—autumn is making inroads despite the heat.
A pileated woodpecker explores a fallen tree in the meadow, the scarlet arrow of his crest appearing and disappearing in the dame’s-rocket.
At daybreak, a small deer leaps and twists like a bronco with an invisible rider, then careens through the purple haze of dame’s-rocket.
An autumnal morning. Two months late, the last dame’s-rocket bends out over the driveway, purple plus signs weighted down with dew.
The black cat crouches at the edge of the meadow full of dame’s-rocket. What hides, squirmed into grassy burrows, under all that purple?
The lilacs are fading fast. Where did the spring go? A hummingbird moth pays court to the dame’s-rockets—the new avatars of purple scent.
A catbird solos in the half-light while wood thrushes trade lines. Small white moths visit the dame’s-rocket. Today, a funeral and a picnic.
The air smells of rain. A large robber fly buzzes into my weed garden and lands on the underside of a dame’s-rocket leaf.