Spare the red and orange terror of
a centipede, or the sadness of a moth, and what about the great cicada tragedy,
does it, just once a year, deafen the trillions of ants and bees on duty.
Mosquito, mosquito, how your sound must tire your geometry body drawn in hair
while bushy caterpillars wrap nets around the crabapple or spread ghost carpets
along shores skimmed by specks so small to be nameless, but when a flying ant
falls, now wingless, it worms a new life into any crevice as the butterfly lives
its myth in a fizz, this leaf, that branch, all this air around to twitch in, or
are you flirting. Gnats gather in random clouds above us and unloved flies home
in on the indefensible warmth of cow ears, horse noses. Oh little ladybug,
rounded ladybird, are you the optimist we have wanted you to be, because the
touched grey millipede curls so quickly into a still fossil, remembering nothing
but fear and itself.