I never underestimate the housefly, its micro-mechanism
buzzed with vinegar and honey, its hairy guts
Splattered on the kitchen window. I pay homage likewise
to the spider and the wood louse, the emperor moth
And the wasp. All these souls precede us. Where would I be
without the carpenter ant and the exalted one, the scarab?
To live side by side on the earth is to suck one another dry.
I stand at the kitchen sink at twilight clipping
My fingernails into running water, not in fear of witchcraft
but of the Board of Health, if they inspected private homes.
In my gut (as in yours, Cleopatra my Empress my Queen) a horde
of silent germs labor over my recent dinner, processing,
Waging holy war. God is eternal surfeit, Heraclitus whispers.
I have grown too old to dream of whispering, and the grackles
Disdain to weep like their weakling cousin robins,
and the leaves and the moon have dissolved
Like vinyl records under acid rain in that cardboard box
I left in a leaky storeroom behind a house I lived in
Thirty years ago, full of rat pellets and moldy fertilizer sacks
and a tintype of a woman who died a year before
The Civil War: she is playing a parlor guitar
and maybe humming, she is calcium dust and wax,
A doll with my face, bristling with needles, bearing the secret
of her life like forgotten music gutting the twilight, vanished now
Into bacteria and potash and a soul particulate as galaxies.
from Hinchas de Poesía