Shadows grow long, reaching from my woods across the grass.
My front yard ripples in the clear golden-green breeze,
as if with waves on a titanic tranquil pond unruffled by boats.
In the west, the sun glows crimson-red and orange, sandwiched
between clouds like something from the Good Humor man
and as it sets, the wind dies with it.
But silence does not take the floor.
Frogs go to work, providing a night-long soundtrack of peace:
peepers, the earliest chorus in spring, sometimes singing in March;
what I call tikka-tikka frogs, that sound like plastic beads in a toy;
buzzer frogs, whose flat trill provides a rhythm to the tikkas;
and the kings of the pond, bullfrogs, whose basso groooonnnnk
cannot be rendered into any decent imitation in print.
Some of my guests have thought I had cows down the hill
and refused to believe the mooing was from a frog.
We take a walk to the pond — holding hands — because the
hill is steep and dew has settled. My friends’ citified eyes are
little help to them, and they cannot make out the Milky Way,
stretched, like a glittering headband, over our heads.
A machine-like, electronic beeeep heralds that my woodcocks
are courting. I can make out a whip-poor will’s call, which incessantly
rings over the house as the whip-poor-wills hunt bugs.
I place a bowl beneath the cooling’s drip by the porch,
and a little green frog obligingly takes up residence there,
catching green creatures and insects by the back door.
Night brings no fears; the moon’s rise at nearly-full casts
silvery glints off the dew. Coyotes howl afar off,
answered by others on hilltops until there seems like 20,
but there are probably only four. I clench not my purse
on the way between car and house; there is no one to take it,
not screech owls, nighthawks, or barred owls.
