Walt Whitman noticed a group of them
suspended near his writing table at lunchtime;
at sunset he looked up and there they still were,
"balancing in the air in the centre of the room, darting athwart, up and
down, casting swift shadows in specks on the opposite wall
where the shine is."
When a person sits concentrating hard,
flies often collect in one spot, in a little bunch,
not far from the brain, and fly through each other.
The next day you can see them in a shaft
of sunlight in the barn, going over an intricacy.
Sometimes they alight on my writing-fingers
as I form letters that look like drawings of them,
or sit on the typewriter watching the keys hit,
perhaps with some of the alert misapprehension
of my mother, when I was in high school,
at the sporadic clacking coming from my room.
Karl Shapiro addressed a fly:
"O hideous little bat, the size of snot!"
Yesterday I killed a fly that had been trying
to crawl up a nostril and usurp a snot's niche.
On being swatted, it jettisoned itself
into my cup of coffee. When I swat and miss,
the fly sometimes flies to the fly swatter,
getting out of striking range by going deeper
inside it, like a child hugging the person who has just
struck her. Or it might alight on my head.
Miroslav Holub says that at the battle of Crécy a fly
alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.
When Emily Dickinson's dying person dies, a fly's
"blue — uncertain — stumbling Buzz" goes with her
as far as it can go. If you fire the stoves
in a closed-up house in the fall, the cluster flies,
looking groggy, will creep from their chinks
and sleeping-holes, our of seeming death.
Soon, if the sun is out, hundreds will appear,
as if being born right there on the window glass.
When so many vibrate together, the murmur
Christopher Smart call the "honey of the air"
becomes a howl. Seiki observes in himself
what is true of me too:
Once I kill
A fly I find I
Want to massacre them all.
Then Antonio Machado cries But . . . but . . . they
have rested
upon the enchanted toy
upon the large closed book,
upon the love letter,
upon the stiffened eyelids
of the dead.
John Clare, who came like the Baptist to prepare us
for the teachings of Darwin, tells us flies
"look like things of the mind or fairies, and seemed pleased or dull
as the weather permits in many clean cottages, and genteel
houses, they are allowed every liberty to creep, fly or do as they
like, and seldom or ever do wrong, in fact they are the small or
dwarfish portion of our own family."
James K. Baxter said New Zealand flies regard him as their whenua,
which in Maori means both placenta and land.
In the year of Clare's birth, William Blake asks:
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
He could not have known the tsetse spits into its bite
the trypanosome, which releases into us
a lifetime supply of sleep, even some extra,
or that the flashy, green, meat-eating botfly
needs flesh to bury its eggs in, living flesh will do,
or that his diminutive cousin, the fly
walking on the lips of his baby, scatters manure
behind him as copiously as the god Sterquilius.
Martin Luther said, "I am a bitter enemy to flies. When I open a book
for the first time, flies land on it at once, with their hind ends,
and nose around, as if they would say, "Here we will squat, and
besmirch this book with our excrement."
The wanton among us, who kill flies for our sport,
like to hear of the evil flies do. Then we swat
with more pleasure, as if we did God's work.
"Is this thy play?" Edward Taylor cries. "For why?"
I think I have a fly inside me.
It drones through me,
at three A.M., looking for what stinks,
the more stinking the better, a filth heap
old or new, some regret, or guilt, or humiliation,
and finds it, and feed, waking me,
and I live it again. Then, with an effort
of will feeble enough if compared with my mother's
when I arrived almost too late at her deathbed
and she broke back through her last coma and spoke,
I swing at it, and it jumps up and swerves away.
I do not think this fly will ever go.
It feels like part of me, and it might no leave
until I rattle out a regret
sufficient to the cause and close the account.
Then it might come out and, if the stove is lit
and the autumn sun bright, fly to the window
above the table, or, if the day is gloomy,
crawl up my upper lip and enter
that nostril at last. So I swat,
flailing at the window without aiming,
until the windowsill, and the big, open
Webster's First, and the desk and part of the floor
are speckled with their paltry remains,
strewn thick as the human dead in the Great War.
One of them rights itself, and walks,
and seems to feel OK, and flies.
My father righted himself out of the muck
where many thousands of dead
stuck out their blue tongues. The Preacher says,
"Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a
stinking savour."
Would that muck were an ointment a chthonic
apothecary oozes up in the earth's devastated places.
But no one who rights himself out of it
and walks and feels OK
is OK.
He knows something, and wants to keep others
from smelling it on him and knowing that he is
the fly in the ointment, wherever he flies.
As the treetops' shadow climbs the window
the flies creep up just ahead of it.
They often collide, and seem troubled and confused,
as though they came here for something
and have forgotten what, and keep looking anyway,
like my father, on coming to America.
When a fly stands motionless on a window,
I wonder if it is looking through the bottom
facets of its eye at the outdoors.
Federico García Lorca said that when
a fly buzzes inside a window,
I think of people
in chains.
And I let it go free.
A fly may not always want to go free,
though the radiant heat through the barrier of glass
may let it imagine that it does. In this
it would be like my mother, in her ardor
for poetry, before she found out
that poetry was what I was up to in my life
—though not in her craving for love in her own life.
When she looked with her blue eye I am sure
it seemed wild and fiery out there and she knew she must go.
I find it hard to imagine that she did not,
at some point, with her big, walker's feet, tread hard
and break through. More than once I felt
a draft of icy air. But my sisters say no.
by Galway Kinnell
