The Ladybug
It’s hard to drink
the poisons
despite how often
they brim and bubble
at our lips
the world is
designed to turn
our heads sideways
and our ankles
around
and make us
the moths to every
unimportant
light
which is why
I fight so hard
to watch my son
sitting on a branch
fretting around
a ladybug in January
that isn’t
actually there
Compass with a Thousand Needles
The thing about the road
to the future
is that from where we stand
it is as wide as a thousand
Roman avenues
and has as many possible directions
as a compass with a thousand
cardinal points
but when we look back down the road
no matter how long we walked,
no matter where or how
often the bends
and the buckles,
a thousand choices made
left it nothing but needle thin.
Poet’s Note
In many ways, poetry as a whole is about attention. We talk about the ‘eye’ of the poem, the ‘lens’ it presents, the ‘focus’ of the piece. The poet narrows down the world into a set and sequence of images that convey their particular slice of it – the thing that arrested them. Both my poems here consider directly the way in which we define and constrain our attention. In “Compass”, the poem considers how we define ourselves in the timeline of our own lives. We easily feel inconsequential when we consider our own impact on a nebulous future – so much so that we forget that if we consider the path that brought us to our present moment, no other sequence of choices could have created this result. “Ladybug” too considers that we must remind ourselves to look to the small things in the world. They define the moment itself. You can only focus on one thing at a time, and so it really matters where we cast our gaze.