A walk in the woods

Selections from a Commuter's Notebook

1. Mornings
when the first
cottonwood

seeds flurry down across
May
lawns and

gather at curbsides and
among the yellow
irises, mornings

like this--Night
forgot
to take in the moon,

it remains
a white stone
in the pool of the sky.


2. Morning
is what the starlings
discuss

as they pick at the chaff
of the newly
mown lawn, while

ambling dogs, grey
of muzzle, sniff
the weed beds

for news: summer,
dare we say it, becomes
general

and insistent
in this patch
of the world. God

cracks the knuckles
of his grass
stained hands.

3. The Lawn
of Rosehill
Cemetery already

gone flat
and golden though
it's not yet July--

In this encampment,
do you hear a murmured
conversation

from the pup tents of the dead?

A Visit From the Hummingbird Moth

I guess I had heard of the hummingbird moth, but I never saw one until yesterday evening. I was talking with my mom on the phone; I was doing this on the back porch because the day had been so hot and the evening was, if not cool, at least cooler. This creature, this messenger appeared--I though it was a hummingbird at first, nosing into the petunias in the planters along the railing, but it moved too slow for a hummingbird, you could see the wingbeats even though they were still incredibly fast. I ran inside, still on the phone with Mom, and gestured to Darren to come outside and look.  He caught the urgency of my gesture and we were both able to watch the fellow dipping his feeding tube into our flowers--five six seven blooms, and then he lifted up and zoomed away into the deepening blue dusk over the rooftops. Son of a moth and an bird's illicit union?  Messenger from the realm of oncoming and ongoing dream? Fantastic, at any rate, in several senses of the word. I felt lucky to have been visited by this missionary.

Here's a borrowed video of what my visitor looked like.  Ours had different coloring but the general size and form were the same.