[the waiting room of the world]

LIFTING MY HAND from the book I find a tiny fruit fly pressed into my hand. Under a loupe I see its fuzzy body froze forever, its beaded crystal eyes no longer glinting in peripherals, and now, just now, a second one appears, silences funeral for resurrection, throws resurrection into restless wings, sharing the particles of we, the years spent shed and spread through central heating, our alms, articulations, a steady ration of ethylene, so many bananas bound for imitating leopards, blackened panther-bound, plantains come home from cravings and forgotten, forged in falling, turned to neutron stars on the counter; a squash embossed, its bottom lost to mold seeming every hour to edge one foot beyond the waiting room of the world, ever-readying its green examination. How lucky we are, I tell the fly, for longer days, that it is the flesh of soft decaying things and not their skin that sustains us.