Ladybugs in November

Ladybugs in November

The love of form is the love of endings.

                          Louise Gluck

                                       “Celestial Music”

That your last line had to have something

to do with endings isn’t surprising I mean

it’s the last line, it’s an ending, we arrived

after watching you watch your friend watch

something dead feed something living.  That

one of you is queasy and looks away, not

missing the point say but not wanting to

see it all play out—maybe it’s the factual

violence of it all and too that its not attached

to anything like morality that it just happens

that it’s a seized opportunity, not planned

but simply there by some casual attraction.

Take the ladybug falling (it’s probably a lady but

though I’m only guessing really, it’s been

a warm few days into this November and we’ve

seen them new and needy in their lethargy)

down to the light and warming herself here in this cold

(28) finally, morning, her carapace click and I hear

the skit of her feet and wings across the up-

turned globe so that her only way out

is to go past that light and I smell the beginning

of her death, and I’m not tall enough to stop

it, and if I were it would tumble out into my face

and still

i could not stop it.  She buzzes her spotted wings, 

she feels things that make me wonder if all the dying

don't feel as they begin to go under for forever: it’s here

maybe I say maybe because what do I know? I’ve

only seen one woman die and she was my mother

and there wasn’t anything beautiful about it

although yes it did have form it did have grace (after
the extubation they didn't let us in on)

it did ease the pain out of her face and take her

(where?) away.  And like this Lady Bird Beetle

she dug and clawed the hospital bed she pulled

what she could into her fist that wasn’t really

a fist anymore and then let go, pulled and let go

and she did this regularly like a heartbeat

and I couldn’t tell if she was grimacing from pain

or if she would always have that tight shape to her

relaxing face or if it were a vacancy clouded sometimes by

a fragrance or a space of complete awake, the way

a washing machine agitates and then doesn’t but 

lets its drum fill with water and those calm calm moments

before the shake.  Four hours after they

(we) unplugged her she was dead she was at her living

end.  So no, it wasn’t without form but yes it wasn’t

beautiful either unless freedom from that kind of suffering

is beautiful, so yes maybe that.  But it started there

it didn’t end there.  After all that she had

her ending finally.  So yes, what’s not to, hollow now

hollow as canyons and creek beds well into their years

of drought, well into the meat of it all, love about that.