What A Fly Might Tell Me About Years To Come

It walks and beats itself against the window.
This is in the midst of a
heat wave in New England, late July.
Soon, banished by
itself to one corner into which those
eight to twelve lifeless eyes stare alone,
the microscopic dreamland.
His body a kite in the infinitesimal knife of a world;
this world with both greater, and more miniscule beasts.
The hair upon my arms crawls disapprovingly at its plight
as the hobos sing songs in the rain.
I touch my hands together and watch the water on the glass.
It cools them, cools the glass.
And I imagine them each
as hands of an older gentleman, and how an old man like that
might touch these same old hands together
while watching a pelican roost on a mossy pillar, while
the sea pitches, and the cool, white object of his
wife rests in her grave.
The fly flips. Six legs writhing. Convulses
directly off of my table; and my bones move
underneath my skin like secrets in the complexities of a lie.
And I think of them—

jaws, fingers, teeth.
All disconnected from their larger pieces, from the greater outline.
And how long that will be.

How much time will pass
between my death and my deterioration, when my thoughts have
dissolved entirely.
How faint will my soul be?
How distant the residues of this life upon
their yellowed surfaces.
How inconsequential my yearning
to keep it.
When that dirt, that time, that matter
has come apart. Slowly spread.

And settled.