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.
gnats
6/4/2013
Bright sun, sharp-edged shadows and a breeze with teeth. Still, the catbird warbles jazz, and small insects drift on glistening wings.
8/30/2012
Cold and clear. A whitish gnat zigzags toward the woods, following a sunbeam, like an anadromous fish ascending its native creek.
6/23/2012
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.
5/28/2012
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.
3/7/2012
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.
6/15/2011
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.