(These poems from Insects of South Corvallis have been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writers’ Almanac. )

          Two Mosquitoes in the Bathtub

They've been here for weeks,
living on leaky faucet drips.
When I draw a bath, they fly a little
but soon settle back among the soap stains.

It's December, freezing outside.
That's why they don't bite me, or mate.
Enormous desires encoded on their chromosomes
lie dormant.  They dream of summer.

Relaxing in hot water, I watch them
doing nothing.  One, the male,
waves his feathery antennae.  He's smaller
and has a broken foot.  The female
is slightly swayback,
maybe just tired.  Science
and Buddhism I call them,
orphan twins in search of lost family,
a couple of itinerant trapeze artists,
a secretly amorous pair of saints.

Whoever they are, they're my guests.
We're sharing our morsel of eternity.
We bathe together.

I admire their geometrical patience,
the tidy way they wrap up leftovers,
their willingness to be the earth's
most diligent consumers of small bitternesses.

Sometimes at night I hear them
casting silk threads, clicking their spinnerets,
plucking their webs like blind Irish harpists.
I can almost taste the fruit of the fly
like sucking the pulp from a grape.

But when their webs on the ceiling
begin to converge, and the floor
glitters with shards of insect wings
I drag out the vacuum
and poke its terrible snout under the sofa,
behind the radio— everywhere,

for this is the home of a human being
and I must act like one
or the whole picture goes haywire.

           Ladybugs

Every January they re-emerge,
anchorites from within our walls,
and cloister themselves on the upstairs window
for a few weeks of fasting and travail.

By day they wander the glass
like desert mendicants, each bug
nothing but a robe and a begging bowl.

By night they huddle
in a corner of the casement,
a little heap of rosary beads,
a handful of prayers incarnate.

Winter being the season of doom,
I have my own austerities to attend to.
But, mornings, when I find
their eclipsed bodies on the windowsill,
lovely and empty as little lacquered urns

I sweep them up with a feather duster
and return them to the garden.

Charles Goodrich ©2010