Category: Autumn

Mid-October and the calendar
of ladybugs directs them to move inside.
Following some unwritten date, they form
colonies of strange ideograms on the walls
and ceilings, their orange-red lacquer
dotted with different combinations
of black spots roving in afternoon sunlight.

Each year they turn back memory’s clock—
thirty years ago, my wife is in Chicago,
I’m in Connecticut with our three children,
just home from a soccer tournament.
Our middle son, nine, flush with pride
of his team’s championship, finds them
that first time: hundreds and hundreds

of ladybugs crawling on windows, walls,
ceilings. And then, my wife’s voice on the phone
from Chicago—her father has died.
For an hour the keening whine of the vacuum,
the peppery smell of ladybugs still alive
or dying inside the bulging bag. After,
I tell our children: Their grandfather is dead.

It’s the first death for each of them,
but the crash of sorrow into happiness
overwhelms our middle son, a wave
of joy and grief roiling inside him.
And then, twenty-two years later,
he too would die in mid-October
with the ladybugs’ arrival, with fall’s gold

leaf light and candelabras of sumac.
Don’t try to make sense of it, I told my son
back then. I thought: all these things,
inextricably but insensibly connected.
That’s what I tell myself every October,
the still unvacuumed ladybugs
like trails of language leading nowhere,
untranslatable and senseless.
~Robert Cording “Ladybugs”

The little fly you squashed and put into the ashtray
—how it walked out later that same day, bold as
you like across the carpet, cold-shouldering your

botched attempt at homicide with the aloofness of a
hired gun to the extent you broke into guffaws then
fell, stricken, to your knees and sobbed, forgiving

every one of your murderous intentions, forgiving
yourself, letting the patch of sun claim its prize.
~Claudine Toutoungi “Lazarus” from Emotional Support Horse

Humans have a love-hate relationship with insects. Mostly hate.

But bugs don’t like us any better when we attempt to swat, step on, smoosh and poison them to oblivion.

I’ve tried to understand the Creator’s design plan, making a place on this earth for mosquitoes, hornets, and scorpions and few other nasty bugs.

There must be some sense to their existence,
even if we fail to understand it.
There must be some sense to our own existence,
even if we fail to understand it.
Perhaps we humans exist just to make life difficult for the bugs.

…all these things,
inextricably but insensibly connected…