A warm morning. The yard is filled with the bright wings of insects drifting up and down, back and forth against the dark woods.
gnats
September 5, 2014
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.
June 4, 2013
Bright sun, sharp-edged shadows and a breeze with teeth. Still, the catbird warbles jazz, and small insects drift on glistening wings.
August 30, 2012
Cold and clear. A whitish gnat zigzags toward the woods, following a sunbeam, like an anadromous fish ascending its native creek.
June 23, 2012
Cool and clear. I keep glancing up from my book—Red Pine’s Taoteching translation—to watch the gnats drifting back and forth on the breeze.
May 28, 2012
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.
March 7, 2012
Large gnats drift back and forth in front of the porch and a fly wanders the rim of my laptop. Two Cooper’s hawks chatter up in the woods.
June 15, 2011
A cloudless sky and air so clear, I can see gnats dancing 100 feet away. In the deep shade, borrowing shards of sun, the wings of a crow.