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Looking close
closer than comfort lets
considering the condition
of human eyes
usually getting worse day by day
though slowly it happens,
no hurt without its blessing,
the myopic gradually able
to see a little further away
as the eyesight of old age
makes the object recede ever further,
the focus, what is seen
being always on its way
away from human seeing
only briefly
shaping its light towards the eye,
close, close, looking no longer
at it but in it, a Dutch still life
by a contemporary of the great Pieter Saenredam
or a little later
a platter of autumn fruits
on white napery, sunlight
looks in one window and night waits
in the other corner
darkness always at the right
in those days, those strange narrow houses,
hours, and between them
six apples, three fat quinces and two
overripe pears almost bursting
with sweetness, brown flecks, a hum of must
or mildew near, in Protestant light
a Catholic ripeness swelling, spoiling almost,
and the painter, Joseph
de Bray perhaps, has been patient enough
to inscribe a squadron of tiny fruit flies
modestly hovering over the ripe fumaroles of the pear
where one much larger of course housefly
has settled busy eating, and looking closer
until the eye has quieted its metabolic
fluster of blood, pressure and pulse,
valve and recurrence, all the doorways
the fact comes through,
beauty and truth and all those binaries
silenced into the silent body, looking close
the eye would see in the stillest
moment of the still life the future stir
when the delicate banquet these insects make
is ended by the fall of light
perhaps and they recede also, everything
recedes, and the little flies
(Drosophila sp.) settle into the coma
that spells their short lives
(though everyone lives the same time
from the beginning to the end
logarithmically divided
seconds hours months years,
a life is whole
from end to end)
but the big Musca, black and roily
from all that sweet dinnering arises
and sails out the glassless window
and the eyes looking close, so close,
can follow it as it humbles through the low sky
all the way to Palestine
where at a late hour it will perch
awkward on the sweaty face
right under the corner of the eye
on the zygoma, the arch
below all human seeing
where it will dwell
as long as it is able
in order to drink what oozes
down from the crown of scabs
on the forehead of
a crucified man, the same
fly, still drunk on Lowland fructose
sucks the redemptive blood.
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