heat

Saturday July 23, 2016

Dave Bonta July 23, 2016

As the heat builds, the cicadas’ electric drills fall silent one by one. Coneflowers wilt until they look like yellow jellyfish.

Dave Bonta August 15, 2015

Hazy and warm. As the sun climbs, the cicada chorus grows, and the field cricket in the garden chirps faster and faster.

Equinox. I spot some goldenrod, done flowering, turning yellow a second time. My mother stops by to tell me about a singing porcupine. …

White sky, bleary sun. Cold air, hot coffee. That equinoctial balance. Crickets trill, chipmunks tick, aspen leaves flip back and forth. …

Under dark clouds, the field full of goldenrod glows in the rising sun's light like some Viking hoard in an archaeologist's trench. …

Clear and cold at sunrise. A migrant thrush calls from the not-yet-ruined temple of the trees. Overhead, the archaic smile of the moon. …

Overcast and cool. Tiny, pale-winged insects drift back and forth, and—perhaps not coincidentally—the yard trees seethe with small birds. …

Wind shuffles the suddenly yellow leaves of elm and birch—their marked decks. A fly wanders the inside of a window pane on sticky feet. …

The hornets stream in and out of their hole in the garden, departing to the south, returning from the east. A towhee calling in the dogwood. …

My mother emerges from the weeds beside the springhouse with a handful of mint. Behind her at the woods' edge, a red-tailed hawk takes wing. …

A series of high-pitched snorts from a deer up on the ridge. Coyote? Bear? Or—imagine the horror for an herbivore—an attack of hay fever? …

Dawn breeze. The whine of tires from the highway over the ridge is punctuated by the heavy thwacks of falling walnuts. …

Blue jays in the rain, less blue than gray, converge on an oak one tree in from the edge, tails like hands spread for a throw of dice. …

Equinox. A flat-white sky, and for the first time I notice two maple trees at the woods' edge already half infiltrated by orange, by red. …