the first was a shieldbug.
in the bathroom where i hang clothes to dry, i found you waddling the drawn-legged march
          of your kind
across mountains of wrinkles,
and i decided to let you be for the time being.
the following day, you’d fallen the fall of Icarus,
and your legs were up against the air and your shield was in the sea of suburban-cream tiles.
 
a cricket was next.
i don’t know its tale, but its legend can say
it was a traveling minstrel who
thought the shieldbug’s corpse lonely.
 
a row at the edge of the living room carpet, neat as the stones in a military cemetery,
captained by a simple brown spider
with a ground beetle for lieutenant
and two too-many-foot soldiers:
millipedes, one languid in death as it had been in the barracks,
the other spiral-furled, probably an old veteran
who was sad to have wielded its antennae in war.
 
the one in the kitchen was discovered with a cosmos-ending crunch.
i bent down bow stance, fingers on toes like a frog to be sure
it wasn’t just a Cocoa Pebble.
rolly polly pillbug,
the empty dry shell of you
was collapsed and bisected like a pleated doric column of an acropolis
whose laws and orders no longer reach its people.
for your eulogy i wish your spirit nectar more sustaining and sweet than a Cocoa Pebble.
 
on the steps to the front door
there was a firefly.
its milky abdomen dead pallor, ghost lantern never to glow.
it had its six legs all tangled together like
someone trying to learn to pray.