A ten-minute downpour. In its aftermath, the ruby-throated hummingbird’s eponymous throat patch rising like a small sun from the weeds.
ruby-throated hummingbird
I hear something chewing in the tall weeds. Behind the lilac, a hummingbird bent on courtship opens the throttle on its small engine.
A light drizzle. The one green leaf at the end of a branch on the otherwise dead cherry shakes itself dry and turns back into a hummingbird.
Up in the field, a turkey erects his traveling theater and poses for an audience of two. The first hummingbird hovers in front of my face.
In the rainy half-dark, a small white oval shifting and wobbling on the end of a branch: the breast of a hummingbird.
When I move my head, the hummingbird darts in for a closer look, leveling her long samurai bill at my neck, my ear, my glasses.
Three hummingbirds circle the blowsy remains of the bergamot at sunrise. One lands on a bare twig and grooms her breast feathers.
Cloudy and cool. Up to its snout in grass, a deer sneezes. The quiet squeaks of a hummingbird circling the beebalm.
A blue-gray gnatcatcher hoovering insects from the cherry leaves hovers almost like a hummingbird, I think, until the real thing zooms by.
I ponder the walking onion in my herb bed—how did it get here? A hummingbird lands on the tip of a branch and shakes water from its wings.
Tiger and spicebush swallowtails circle the white lilac. Leaves blow backwards. A ruby-throated hummingbird hovers a foot from my nose.
Ah, the inversion layers of autumn! A hummingbird materializes in front of me, her approach covered by the din, and studies my bright shirt.
A hummingbird defending her patch of soapwort buzzes an ovenbird, who walks back and forth on the cherry branches in his big pink feet.
A mosquito creeps across my shirt, an inchworm measures my jeans, and a hummingbird circles my head: this morning, I’m doomed to disappoint.