Ladybug

Billy Collins

I first spotted her moving across a copy
of the new Boston Review of Books,
which I was eyeing with some suspicion
as I ate dinner alone at the kitchen table.

Then, as if she were sick of literature,
exhausted by the thought of criticism,
she slid onto the table and began to climb
a porcelain holder for wooden matches,

a remnant from the great Age of Smoking
that I lifted long ago from a restaurant in France.
I don't know where she thought she was headed
as she ascended the little tower with such confidence

you would think she had an uncle in Tourin
and then went round and round the rim,
but when she began to inch
onto the bunched red and blue match heads,

it seemed clear that she was a daredevil,
escaped perhaps from a circus of fleas.
As I drank my wine and ate my thin steak
and my lemony green beans,

I explored some other analogies
like a boy lost in an ancient hotel.
Was she a symbol of the Virgin, the soul of a friend,

So hard to quiet the mind,
to turn out the lights in one's own toy shop-
it was only after I had cleared the dishes
that I came to rest on the realization

that she had come simply to deliver
the message of herself,
the memo of her existence,
the incontestable news of her tiny being.