Bird Ten: Ladybug Season

Now that I no longer "have to" write about red, I suddenly have something red to say...
My home blooms ladybugs for many weeks every March.

Ladybug Season

Our lives are littered with ladybugs –
a friendly plague emerging with each spring.
You gamely try to rescue every one.

Appearing in loose huddles along
the window sills, forming speckled
tableaus on the crown molding,

tracing invisible trails along the
lampshade seams and shutter slats,
searching for each other, for the way out.

I am their salty goddess. Never does
one fail to scale my offered fingertip,
to skate a ticklish path along my palm.

I will encounter their remains for months –
freshly wincing at each bitter carcass
crunching underfoot.

How I miss them already. Sad, dead
spotted things – forever crawling
when they had the chance to fly.

Image source: http://www.cirrusimage.com/beetles_multicolored_Asian_ladybird.htm

Some Books: 35 + 1 = ?

I have been procrastinating on completing this tag (from Jessica @ 9to5Poet), partly because it kind of felt like homework, but, mostly, because how on earth can I pick 35 books to represent myself?! Every book I have ever read -- good, bad, or indifferent -- is rattling around in my being...

I don't even know what this list is, except, perhaps, a stream-of-consciousness sample of some books that have stayed with me. I can only say these are the books that came to mind, in the order they came there, and I stopped at 36 -- that's how old I am this year. This is torture.

1. Roots - Haley
2. The Little Prince - St. Exupery
3. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - Konigsburg
4. Where the Sidewalk Ends - Silverstein
5. Danny, Champion of the World - Dahl
6. Maus - Spiegelman
7. Understanding Comics - McCloud
8. The House on Mango Street - Cisneros
9. The Language Instinct - Pinker
10. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
11. Jane Eyre - Bronte
12. The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner
13. Bird by Bird - Lamott
14. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston
    
15. A Whole New Mind - Pink
16. The Tipping Point - Gladwell
17. The Poisonwood Bible - Kingsolver
18. The Lovely Bones - Sebold
19. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Angelou
    
20. A Wizard of Earthsea - Leguin
21. Weetzie Bat - Block
22. How to Eat Like a Child - Ephron
23. The Hobbit - Tolkien
24. The Chronicles of Narnia (Set) - Lewis
25. Pippi Longstocking (Set) - Lindgren
26. The Color Purple - Walker
    
27. Reflections on the Gift of a Watermelon Pickle - Dunning, et al
28. A Day No Pigs Would Die - Peck
    
29. Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art - ed. Greenberg
30. Preposterous - ed. Janeczko
    
31. The Cider House Rules - Irving
32. The Transitive Vampire - Gordon
    
33. Interview with the Vampire - Rice
34. Orbiting the Giant Hairball - MacKenzie
35. The Dot - Reynolds
36. God Went to Beauty School - Rylant

Image by gadjoboy

Bird Nine: Red Weather

I was determined to be a good kid and write something red-inspired this week, but my body resisted. For some reason, I kept thinking about Wallace Stevens' "tigers in red weather." And, of course, a strawberry kool-aid moustache. I am not sure I like any of these kooky vignettes even at all, but, nonetheless, here they are in their little red jackets.

(In the interest of "embodying" my work, I did indeed bite my own arm for the first time in 25 years to see how long the bite-marks would remain).

Poor bird -- perhaps it's doomed to a life of hapless flapping.

In Red Weather

the man with the kool-aid moustache
flings his boomerang briefcase
into the bloody sky and skates away.

the woman escaping the garden
strangles each tomato on the burdened vine,
lunges toward the low-hanging moon.

the uncle with hibiscus eyes
pulls a twisting niece onto his plump lap,
inhales her damp popsicle scent.

the boy with werewolf daydreams
sinks pup-fangs into his forearm flesh,
shivers as the crimson bite-marks fade.

the grandmother standing in the rose hedge
kneads her toes into the loam,
shuts her papered lids and waits to bloom.