The Ballad of the Fettered Fly

i.

Musca domestica,
leathered in bibleblack,
bound in a corset
of chitin and wax,

Legs buttress your walls
buoying your vaulted shell,
holding gravity at bay

[a hobo holding back
a pack of dogs
with a six
foot fly's leg --
Musca gargantua]

Whalebone
ribs your corset,
the waxing moon,
the full white swell
of your bulging belly.

[I place my face
beside the quickening tide
of your abdomen;

May I play the moon
in this elliptical dance?]


ii.

Lindy ties the fly
with a thread of tale
spun silk to the air
plane's spinning nose, she

feeds the fly a
razor cut line, as
thin as scarred night's
caesarian crescent, he

cries, onward,
across the sea!


iii.

- pop -


iv.

The fly plummets
deeper than sound,

past bluebottles stuffed
with aery mail and trailing tails
that wrap around a listener's ear,
that pour nematocysts
like sky blue sins
down dear old Uncle's ear,
(that leather purse,
always void of change);

plummets deep

past jacksmelt, bonito,
pacific salmon, past pez luna
themselves passing behind
flashing clouds of silversides
that whirl about : a drunkard's
spinning room;

plummets deep

past giant cuttlefish, eyes
round and blank as
dinner plates
spinning on a broom;

plummets deep,
then comes to rest

away from phasic swell of fuselage,
those crescent rows of airplane ribs
that wax and wane in soundless depths --

plumbs the depths and comes to rest
beside a stray rib,
halfburied in mud,
that marks the grave
of her aery heart,

bottle of unbeating blood,
blue with air and aneurism,
bubbles in the line, bubbles
spinning like the moon.

[the fuel cuts,
the camera blinks,
the plane sinks,
subject to gravity's
eternal rain].

v.

The moon, greaseblack with new;
the seafloor's rampant night, until


vi.

Grace intervenes, razors thorax
(chitin, film of wax) from wing

(two thin frames,
sprocket-lined & mullion veined,

that surface to spread, oil slick
across a Pacific rainbow screen)

Toto, I have a feeling that
Antipodes.




Note: This poem properly belongs after "Legwork." --The eds.