Two years later, the branch still dangles upside-down above the forest floor. A hummingbird pauses over a tansy and taps it with her bill.
ruby-throated hummingbird
Come hummingbird and bring some glitter to this damp gray morning, buzz around the bergamot, pizzazz at the beebalm’s one bedraggled bloom.
Beside the springhouse, the twittering zoom of a hummingbird’s courtship dive: from sunlight into cattail shadows and back. Tanager song.
A hummingbird grooms itself in the middle of a downpour while a phoebe plucks insects from the side of the dead elm, hovering in place.
A hummingbird checks me out before visiting the bergamot, and again afterwards. Then she zips down to the stream for the briefest of drinks.
A hummingbird does a quick circuit of the bergamot, then zips across the road to check out the limp orange tubes from yesterday’s daylilies.
A hummingbird lands on the upturned tip of a dead elm branch; the branch doesn’t move a hair. The first open peony lies on its side.
Foggy morning. A short-lived bright period brings a faint sound of traffic from I-99. I hear the hummingbird’s small motor in the garden.
Cloudy and cool. A tanager’s plucked string; no glimpse of scarlet. Where are they off to, the hummingbirds that keep zooming past my porch?