On Seeing a Still Ladybug on a Book of Poems

On Seeing a Still Ladybug on an Open Book of Poems

She’s succumbed, numb, fatigued, into the half carapace

of herself.  For the past hour she’s turned in whole

or half circles, drunk maybe from a fall I didn’t witness,

her turning never perfect or complete.  Alive (maybe now

she’s just asleep) she reminded me of what Wyeth sees when he’s

looking out at Christina’s from a bare bedroom and how his second story

window-glance gives him perfect height to sight a crippled

daughter hauling her hunched hips and hopeless legs up the furrow.

Those bones, year after year, made it clear for her to tend the stones

of her people, to heap manure near to the geraniums, as if

the only half suffering from a fall was what was under her

pelvis, those true wings still, almost unfolded, or two halfs of a buffet salver

intended for God’s altar.  She’s curved and creaky.  She’s gone rheumy.

And like the ladybug, freezes as though her only purpose now

was to go to dust.  But before all that, there’s the sighing and lying

down.  There’s the light of April's nearly May moon hexed across the floor.

There’s that bedroom window Christina can’t reach and wouldn’t

and a man, dead now too, who immortalizes her 
in that field of gold.