Fruit Flies

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn… Keats
Though you cellar it in the shrewdest cold,
airtight, and without the faintest print
or contusion, thinking of nothing,
and lounge at sundown by a golden window,
they will descend, as if remembering,
on whatever is turning.
You will hear in a drowse their breezeless
pervasion of your screens all evening
and not know whether darkness
or a hand-size swarm of them conspires
to disturb, in your hand, the focus of a pear.
And then, because your noticing makes more,
they are everywhere, a graininess in vision,
as if you had stayed up past your usual hour,
or some memory had persisted all year
as hands near your hand, an air on the air.
What you have spared all year, unwillingly,
they love to the stone, a live annihilation,
and when nothing is left whole they settle,
uncloyed, over your spills, or concentrate
in a clouded spoon.
Or shade, when your eyes must close,
your moist lids, or the little bridge of your lips,
and behind your ear the finger of cologne,
and everywhere you open, the sweet fluids.
So close at last
you cannot say where the delve and pause
of your breathing ends, and they begin,
something like passion, only helpless and weary,
something like darkness, only rife and wild,
body that fills your body to the eyes.

James Richardson
“Fruit Flies” is from Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press, 2004).