March 7, 2010

How long since I've seen marbles, noticed veins in them,
schist and mica rubble trapped inside a serene and milky sphere?
And yet I live in the town where globes for libraries and schools
were broadcast to the rest of the world, with borders
a satellite photo falsifies. What is committed to ink,
what dries upon the page to become writing, may be merely
a record of words circulated in memory nearly a week
separate from the thoughts they contain, the chaff from wheat.
Thus the final justice when all comes out haphazardly.

A ladybug settled inside the lampshade instead of a fly.
But the fly that sits inside the lampshade is a ladybug
once in a while. The spotted helmet flares into multiple wings
aflurry, as it flies. A small fly not in its prime
lands on the ceiling, then against the wall, then bumps
between lightbulb and lampshade, and touches you.
It lets itself be swatted away, not juvenile but weak,
enough time to be swatted with the local newsweekly,
in which you'd never know that it was here
where the drafter's hand transposed the mercator projections
to cloth and paper globe with the thickness of this lampshade,
in which the fly finds respite in warmth but insufferable confinement
in its circumference, beating its head against it and circling the lightbulb,
what it knows of the sun that it seeks to crawl within by force alone:
open up, and let me in, a little fly, enter your hot singularity.
The lightbulb is a sun on the center of the earth, the place they
made the globes and sold their projections to themselves, until the
industry expired, leaving these houseflies to circle small suns.
Myself I must be hundreds of feet from where the globes were made.