Spring Cleaning

While repainting that garden table,
(in another life it was the front door)
a tangle of small lives
who'd made their home in something forgotten
got upended:

a colony of wood lice scrambling from dirt
caked in the rotted legs;
spiraling seeds from the sycamore
gathered in the pits of the knots;
golden ladybugs, mid-coitus, hiding in the joinery;
wizened spiders laying dust eggs atop
a cluster of rusted screw heads.
I sat upon an ant parade
come up the bricks on the benches.

A channel of white paint and insect bodies
gutters the drain. My table gleams
in springtime sun.

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