Self-Portrait as Dung Beetle

Researchers have found that beetles of this species use the bright glow from the Milky Way
to navigate during night-time operations.
—Wikipedia

It’s not as bad as one might think,
rolling your little dung ball around the park 
on a moonless night—a job
only you can do because nobody else 
knows how to make a perfect sphere
of the shit you’ve collected over the years.
You push it past the empty cage
of tennis courts, past the dangling swings
without the swung, across the creaking footbridge 
that mutes the love songs of frogs.
It has become familiar, smooth
from the turning: the orphaned baby bird 
you clubbed as a boy, revolted by
its weakness; the poem you wrote 
about your college girlfriend’s family; 
the day you told your father he chose
diabetes. Over and over, packed together,
until impenetrable, onto the deserted dirt infield, 
rounding third base backward
on hands and knees, pushing it home 
with your feet. When I cut my daughter’s
umbilical cord (or was it my wife’s?), it felt 
tougher than expected—fibrous like a 
braided rope. This can be a new beginning, 
I thought, something to hang a future from. 
You can be anything you want to be, I said. 
But that’s not the whole story, is it?
Most of my decisions have been wrong.
A body wishes to make a home from its past.
And what can you do about that
on a moonless night when the frogs
go silent at your passing? This compulsion 
to create a little spinning planet,
lit only by a smear of light from stars
so far away they look like spilt milk.

Read more from Issue 18.2.