This is the second poem I have written about flies!  I sometimes think that I go out of my way to find the least likely subject matter for my poems, but I also have to admit that the subject matter arises naturally.  Well, as naturally as anyone who constantly makes notes in a little book can be thought of as doing something natural!
     This poem is the result of using material from two notebooks based on two observations.  As I was writing about the second, I had remembered writing about the first, and so it was only 'natural' that I should try and link the two in a poem.
     This has taken a number of drafts to get to this stage and the final few drafts jettisoned four lines which I had stubbornly kept in all the previous drafts in spite of the fact that I knew that they did not really fit.  I made an abortive attempt to fit two lines in a late draft, but had to admit that the poem was better without them!
     In my previous poem, "Flies", I wrote a couple of lines which I remember whenever I brush an insect from my skin, "they tickle-foot their / filthy way around".  The present "Two flies" do not get to touch me: one is on a café parasol and the other fell on my notebook and, I thought was blown away, but turned up the next day, dead, when I started to write the next day's notes - preserved in the pages of my notebook.
     Flies represent 'Other' fairly well.  They are irritating; they spread disease; their ways of eating are repulsive and they have strange eyes.  What does the world look like to them?  After all, they belong to a group of creatures that, for the most part, do not take much notice of the mild irritant of humanity which barely rates a notice on what is, after all, their world rather than ours.
     I am not sure if this poem is anything more than observation, but I was conscious that, while I was writing it I was thinking about perception, opposition and arrogance.
     Donne was diminished by any man's death; should we feel the same way for a fly?  Or for any living thing?  A reductio ad absurdam would mean we should be mourning for bacteria and disease when we use medicines to cure and kill!
     All of these ideas were running through my head when I was writing and perhaps the poem needs a period of settling before I can understand if it was what I was trying to say.
     Anyway here it is for your response.

Two flies

Through my conflicted eyes

I think the animal no more than stain

on cream and taut expanse of parasol.

But then I think I see a gap

between the body and the cloth

where tiny legs must help it

hunker down against the air.

            For it: a cataclysm

made of tautened, windy stuff.

How does it stay secure in draughts

that agitate the pages of my book

and pennant the red-ribboned mark

above the current page? 

            What anchor can it find?

And what, exactly, does it see from its small

vantage point, compared to my inclusive gaze?

Surely its view is only rippling wave,

an undulating plain of woven just-off-white,

and curved (so like the world it will not see)

within the compound of its eye.

And now: a different thing.

Another fly has tumbled

to my notebook page,

with splintered wings of cellophane,

to catch a glimpse of autumn sun –

            and then is gone.

What did that see before it dropped

and fell, breeze-scooped away?

But I discovered that it had been caught,

composed, by the unfilling space

of empty lines; by notes and poems

not begun throughout the waiting

white of the next page

And dead.  Quite dead. 

Compressed – not smeared.

Its body free to move from line

to line, responding to my hand,

and waiting for a pen

to build a tomb.

Who knows what other 'Fly' poems I might write!  I have to admit that the next, if I go by my notes, will be on Christmas decorations hanging from trees!

All comments welcome.