One of the great pleasures of writing, I think,
is to fulfill one of the great duties of poetry, which
is to try to restore, to despised things, some
of the dignity we've taken away from them.
And this is such a poem.
It's a little unusual because it quotes poets, quite
a number of poets, maybe--
I don't know, I've never counted them-- five or six poets.
The way an essay does, when it finds something
expressed better than--
very well, instead of trying to say it again,
it just quotes the passage from--
and acknowledges the source.
So that's what happens in this poem.
And I should say, also, that my father spent four years
in the trenches in the First World War,
and he appears in this poem as a soldier.
But, otherwise, I hope it's intelligible.
It's called "Flies."
"It is reassuring about flies that they
are named flies and spend much of their time flying.
When Whitman sat down to work one morning, they were flying.
When he looked up at sunset, he saw them still,
the swarm of flies suspended, balancing
in the center of the room, darting athwart,
casting swift shadows and specks on the opposite wall
where the shine is.
Sometimes when a person sits concentrating hard in a room,
the flies gather and fly through each other,
in one spot in a little bunch all day, not far from the head.
Often you can see them the next afternoon,
in the gloom of the barn, going over the intricacies.
Sometimes when they stop flying, some
try to sit on my writing fingers,
as I form letters that look like drawings of flies.
Especially that morning, I have parted the thicket hair
of my beloved and dipped my fingers
into the well of sharp scented love fluid.
Or they land on the typewriter and watch
the keys hit, perhaps with a little of the apprehension
of my mother.
At the sound like that of many fly swatters at work
of the steady--
of the steady--" Sorry.
"Or they land on the typewriter and watch
the keys hit, perhaps with a little of the apprehension
of my mother at the steady clacking of my typewriter
when I should have been doing something.
If I swat and miss, the flies sometimes
settles on the fly swatter, getting out
of striking range by venturing deeper inside it,
like a boxer hugging or a child clinging to the person who
has just struck her.
Sometimes it alights on my head.
Miroslav Holub said that at the Battle of Crécy,
a fly alighted on the blue tongue of the Duke of Clervaux.
When Emily Dickinson's dying person dies,
she takes a fly's blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz
into death as far as it can come.
If you fire the stoves in a closed-up house in late fall,
the cluster flies will creep from their chinks and sleeping
holes out of seeming death.
And soon, if the sun is out, hundreds of them
will seem to generate right there on the windows,
jostling each other, looking cheerful and sociable.
Christopher Smart called the murmur
of flies the honey of the air.
When so many vibrate together on the glass,
the murmur can become a howl.
Yesterday I killed a fly that had been trying
to enter one of my nostrils.
Karl Shapiro called a fly, Oh hideous
little bat the size of a snot.
This fly was intent on usurping a snot snitch.
And being swatted, it jettisoned itself into my cup of coffee.
Seiki observed in himself, what is true of me too?
Once I kill a fly, I find I want to massacre them all.
Then I heard Antonio Machado say, but, but they
have rested upon the enchanted toy, upon the closed book,
upon the love letter, upon the rigid eyelids of the dead.
John Clare came like the baptist to prepare us
for Origin of Species, the book that teaches that we
and flies our cousins, and tells us,
after dancing on the window all day, from sunrise to sunset,
they would sip of the tea, drink of the beer,
and eat of the sugar, and be welcome all summer long.
They look like things of mind or fairies
and seem pleased or dull, as the weather permits.
In many clean cottages and genteel houses,
they are allowed every liberty, to creep, fly,
or do as they like and seldom or ever do wrong.
In fact, they are the small or dwarfish portion
of our own family.
How could Clare know that tsetse fly spittles
into its bite, the trypanosome that releases a lifetime
supply of sleep, even some extra,
or that the flashy, green, meat-eating botfly needs
flesh to lay its eggs in, living flesh will do.
Or that all the members of this dwarfish portion
shake bits of manure from their hairy tarsi,
on the lips of our babies, on children who hardly
notice if they were once--
Thee, art not thou a man like me?
The fly might have said with some shame, yes.
And with some pride, no.
The wanton among us, who kill flies for sport,
don't mind if we think we are doing God's work.
When Christopher Smart tells us the fly
feeds upon the thing strangled and perishes
as if especially deserving to die,
we swat with more pleasure.
Is this thy play, Edward Taylor frowns.
For why?
I think I kill flies because I have a fly inside me.
It drones through me, at 3:00 AM waking me,
looking and looking for what stinks, some humiliation,
old or new.
The more stinking the better.
The more ancient, the more putrid.
And finding it lands and feeds, then I suffer it all again.
Then, with an effort of will almost as large as my mother's,
when I came too late to her deathbed
and she broke back through the last coma a moment and spoke.
I swat at it, brush it away, and, again,
it flies, droning through me, looking for the next filth
heap.
I do not believe this fly will ever leave.
It feels like part of me.
It is like my own soul.
Probably it will not go until a last sigh utters
a burden of regret, sufficient to the cause,
and closes the account, then it might come out.
And if the stove is lit and the October sun bright,
go to the same window above the desk,
where I may have swatted it.
Or if it is cold, crawl up my upper lip and creep
into that nostril at last.
So I swat, hitting the windows, stunning a dozen
flies to death with each stroke.
Soon the window sills and the tables are cluttered
and the dictionary speckled and the floor
strewn with their pitiful remains,
thick as the human dead in the Great War.
Every so often, one of them rights
itself and walks around and seems to feel OK and flies.
My father righted himself out of the muck,
where many thousands of dead men stuck out their blue tongues.
The preacher said, dead flies cause
the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking saber.
Might not the muck be the ointment
of our heavenly apothecary, oozing up almost immediately
in so many of the earth's sorest places.
No one who rights himself out of the muck
and walks and shakes himself and feels OK is OK.
He knows something about the human for the rest of his days,
and he must keep others from smelling it on him
and knowing that he is the fly in the ointment, wherever
he flies.
When the treetop's shadow spreads up the window,
the flies creep up just ahead of it.
Sometimes they lose their grip and fumble
to the bottom and creep up again.
They often collide and appear anxious and confused,
as though they have come here for something
and have forgotten what but keep looking anyway,
like my father on coming to America.
Walking on the windows, they sight down between their four
legs, with the lowest facets of their eye,
and see the outdoors.
Federico García Lorca said that when a fly buzzes inside
a window, I think of people in chains and I let it out.
A fly may not always want to go out.
It is rough and cold out there.
Perhaps only the presence of glass
lets it imagine that it does.
In this, it would be like my mother,
in the attitude she had toward poetry,
until she found out that it was what I was up to in my life,
though not in her attitude toward love in her own life.
I am sure that when she looked with her blue eye,
it seemed wild and fiery out there and she wanted to go.
I find it hard to think that she did not,
at some point with her heavy feet,
tread hard and break through.
More than once I felt the drafts of icy air,
but my sisters say, no."
[APPLAUSE]