This
Journal

October
1999

buzz. it says and then says it again. slamming its insect light boneyness up against the ceiling here and then over there, but mostly back between the blinds and windows for this wild performance, a roaring fly. anger in the smallest places. goes invisible goes silent when i rise to swat it.

About two weeks ago, I noticed a fly. And then another. Ever since, the cat and I have been entertaining three or four at a time. They do not enter through the door. There are no noticeably big enough gaps in the windows and screens. The flies simply appear; as if, to avoid the coming chill, they had unbodied themselves and passed through brick and plaster, reincarnating on this side. I'm sure there's a more logical explanation.

I asked Dominic if he knew about these flies, and he said, "Oh, just vacuum around the windows." But that wasn't my point. "I mean, where do they come from; how do they get in?" He just shook his head and muttered something about Cletus. Lynn, our cleaning lady, says "This building is forty years old - lots of cracks." (She has trouble with that last word. Born and raised in China, every day she tangles with impossible sounds, like "cracks", which comes out something like "hwahhck". A little while ago I tried to help her say "oil change" with no success. We both laughed at these funny articulations. Maybe she can teach me some impossible Chinese sounds.)

But those flies have just this accidental language of wingsinmotion. Do those noises signify? Certainly to us. That tiny din at the back of our mind. Death and decay. Lord of the Flies. And they are dirty little things. We know where they have been. They are so utterly foreign, relishing that which repulses us. Death and decay.

Fly, Muse, bringer of poems. Miroslav Holub delivers this irony:

She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on the disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies
(translated from the Czech by Ian Milner and George Theiner)

And then we've got Miss Dickinson's equally ironic, less contemplative critter:

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -

With Blue - uncertain stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -

Fly swatter. No fly swatter. They're easy targets; this weather slows them down. But I don't want fly guts splattered on these magazines, this recent book catalogue on smudgy newsprint, or my wall. It will die in time, if I can just put up with the racket.

This bright blue Halloween is warm and full of golden leaves. The kids come out at three, nothing too creepy in broad daylight. I'll spare me nostalgias of Halloween past in the cold dark and so wet that the bag gives way right there on the street. The darkness was certainly a big part of it though. We could play at fear in that dark because we felt the world was, at heart, a safe place.

So maybe I'll appear at your front door tonight. I like chocolate stuff, but don't mix it with peanut butter please. Forget the apples altogether. I'll be the puny little guy in black and green, buzzin'.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest if it sits on the fly-swat.
G. C. Lichtenberg