a ladybug, cicadas, bumblebees,a  butterfly and moths: portrait of a marriage in stasis.

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The ladybug climbed the porcelain salt column,
on my breakfast table, heading to a nowhere 
heaven with confidence, its beauty rounding 
and rounding the rim- delivering the message 
of  herself in its tiny being.
 
I admired this bug that did not crave the darkness,
or need not crawl headfirst into a dirt womb to sleep,
wait seventeen years to remerge and finally live.
 
The last of the moon shadow of all my angry bees  
is pulling out the last stingers of the night
before my wife awakens from her grouchy slumber,
waving her hands, shooing the last of the night hive away.

My son’s drawing of a butterfly with a parachute
is pinned to the refrigerator, waiting for comment:
oblongs of green, coconut, grape and yellow sunshine
flanked two per side amidst a sky of billowing hearts-
his imaginations and hopes bumping into our reality.

My wife looks at it  silently, struggling for conversation
in the morning haze. “You and I are doing our best, “
I say, keeping it light.  The moths inside me escape, 
their filaments dumbly fluttering against my cheek.  
I brush them away, these pale reminders of ourselves.