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.

 

 

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Robert Cording taught English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross for thirty-eight years and then worked for five years as a poetry mentor in the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. He has published ten collections of poems, the latest of which is In the Unwalled City (Slant). Slant also published a volume of his essays on poetry and religion, Finding the World’s Fullness.

 

 

 

Photo by Ram Kishor on Unsplash