Warm and breezy at sunrise. One katydid is still calling, as if reluctant to see the end of what could be the katydids’ last big party night of the year. Two yellow walnut leaves land on my laptop.
katydids
Before the first birds, a thin, gaping moon. A last katydid stopping mid-creak. The whine of tires on the highway over the ridge.
Dawn. The last katydid falls silent. The fourth-quarter moon, curled up like a dried fish, disappears into a cloud.
Breezy and overcast at dawn. From up in the woods, the declarative WHO! of a barred owl. The last katydid rattles to a stop.
A warm-for-autumn morning. An east wind drives great flocks of yellow leaves out of the woods. One of last night’s katydids starts up again.
Down-hollow, the nocturnal katydids are already getting started: time is short. A fly on its back treads the air, trying to right itself.
A fork-tailed bush katydid lands on the bottom railing, looks around, then flies off toward the woods on wings half grass blade, half angel.
Breezy and warm. A tulip-tree samara helicopters past the porch. In one of the bare birches, a single katydid plays his worn rasp.
Bright morning after a cold night. One katydid still stridulates, seemingly in dialogue with a blue-headed vireo—two slow, three-beat calls.
A katydid clings to the side of the house at sunrise, its veined leaf of a body immobile in the cold but still as green as July.
A katydid that had been perched on my chair leg walks jerkily across the porch and stops in the shadow of a railing, outlandishly green.
Picking bergamot leaves, I’m startled by one leaf that leaps to escape: a katydid. It watches me wild-eyed from an adjacent plant.
The low cloud ceiling is a tabula rasa for the arabesques of chimney swifts. A high-pitched rasping in the trees–some insomniac katydid.