Fly

From the archives

I.
When they arrived to carry your body from the place
in which it could no longer dwell, they found your heart
had stopped beating and hardened
into the shape of a heart, a relic
of your mutiny, the slow bleeding ended.

Did you go by the degree, like falling in deep water
with light and sound closing farther and farther above
your head until there came peace, or did you glide
buoyant and vacant as a loose sleeve in the breeze,
the wait lifting from your body, as you drifted
back to the womb of God, finally deciphering
the physics of the soul. No further discussion.

You sealed all worlds in that last swallowing, left us
none. I painted then to keep breathing. Layers of hues
without narration; the canvas not the story of you
but the evidence. That is all we leave behind. God
uttered let there be light and light is still expanding.
Let there be and you were. You pulled the trigger
but you could not take away your having been.
Who could’ve saved you from that?
Cut me and find dry bone, hollow
pipes that hold no music.

II.
The fly beats itself against the windshield
and we are bothered by its grating buzz,
its fluorescent fury, it’s crazed attempt
to penetrate the wall it cannot see
but cannot cross, to find itself once again
gliding the free air. It can see its lost
homeland, crystalline in the glare
of the sun, the warmth of which we feel
on this side of the window.
The tiny flagellant cannot perceive
what hinders it, why cannot reach
what it clearly sees before it.
We speed deeper into the midst of the world
the fly is exiled from, watch it whirl past
on all sides, indifferent to its struggle, unmoved
by its artless pantomime. It will fall, finally,
exhausted, to the dash, buzz and revive itself
a time or two, and surrender. We will witness its defeat
without pity, relieved of its tinny complaint, 
smug in our perception of space, of glass
of the sun on our laps, as if it could still reach us.