In my grandfather's house
for the first time in years,
houseflies big as bumblebees
playing crazy football
in the skim-milk-coloured windows,
leap-frogging from
the cracked butter saucer
to our tin plates of
rainbow trout and potatoes, catching the bread
on its way to our mouths,
mounting one another
on the rough deal table.
It was not so much their filth
as their numbers and persistence and--
oh, admit this, man, there's no point in poetry
if you withhold the truth
once you've come by it--
their symbolism:
Baal-Zebub,
god of the poor and outcast,
that enraged me, made me snatch the old man's
Family Herald, attack them like a maniac,
lay to the left and right until the window sills
over-flowed with their smashed corpses,
until bits of their wings
stuck to my fingers,
until the room buzzed with their terror...
And my grandfather, bewildered and afraid,
came to help me:
"never seen a year
when the flies were so thick"
as though he'd seen them at all before I came!
His voice so old and baffled and pitiful
that I threw my club into the wood box and sat down
and wanted to beg his forgiveness
as we ate on in silence broken only
by the almost inaudible humming
of the flies rebuilding their world.
