April and a black
fly at my window
slugs his dormant buzzz
against the blue pane
heavy, fat & unloved
he was spent
from his vented life
embalmed by winter
Hibernation kept him
safe a while
& then it killed him
when he wanted out for good
Vermin of the ledge
he never found a mate
his dream smacked
impotence on that glass
No angels sing his hymn
He lies uncanonized
in a valley of bureaucrats
no monument for his shade
Leaving work I think of him
as the sun warms my soul
Breathing slow the afternoon air
I feel myself rise rise rise
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And then there is leaving work/driving home from work…. Keats thought the poet was “the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity–he is continually…(empathically) filling some other body.” As he said “If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”
Amazed always at flies that hatch out of nowhere, so to speak, and forever enthralled at the story (described by Thoreau) of the bug that one day hatched from an egg embedded in a 60 year-old apple-tree table, I once wrote my own way to a winged life on wings of poesy and imagination. What the soul or spirit wants or needs most, it will create under the ribs of death.
This poem was also an alternate take on Katherine Mansfield`s story “The Fly”. Thus, it is and has been the possibilities and intimations that have long interested me as I have literally and figuratively written myself into existence. Certainly if one finds one is or has been living what Eliot called the “buried life”, one may still find escape, hope, and new life through the sheerness of will and the potentially indefatigable, undefeatable human spirit.