just learned via chris murray’s *Texfiles in Bahrain* that wild nature tv aussie guy steve irwin has died … of a stingray’s barb to the heart …

either the guy on the mower yesterday had a soft spot for these fungi … i think not … or they popped up quickly … one might even say “mushroomed” … overnight …

meet moby …

& tweedle-dum & tweedle-dee …

check out paula’s pictures … & be sure to click them so you get a bigger view

well … there’s “my” garden out the window past the kitchen sink … and in it there’s a young rabbit nibbling the decorative weeds … two goldfinches feasting on the late august coneflower (no longer gorgeous, but useful) … two small white butterflies (moths?) in the lavender in the nasturtiums … three brown doves pecking the mulch for bugs i guess …

when i step out the back door to clip the used-up roses the critters mostly run off … in their own ways … but up close i hear another level … the garden of buzzing life … whirring & clicking in on over under & around the flowers & leaves … wild life in the old mint … tiny things that need what’s here … at least three kind of bees … black wasps & brown … japanese beetles in the roses … spidery things in red orange yellow flowers … if you stop & look at nothing in particular but rather at the whole … you see it moving … currents of animal life … arranging & rearranging the air about all these vegetable surfaces …

& i say howdy … welcome all … to each part & every whole of it all … howdy

and then there’s the garden in the mind … that never quite ever shows up in any year … mostly resists all invitation …

fine … stay put

before i put this day to sleep … this the last friday of the summer …

on the walk yesterday and today we passed what had been a tall young tree … someone had chopped it down … really hacked at it … we imagined what kind of drunk kid it would take to murder a tree … angry kid … take that, dad kind of kid … impulse to wreck break shatter smash trash kill … old in the mind of man … going on all over the planet … all over our place

a dark cold picture for a bright hot day …