On a day so hot not even the housefly
watching you can move,
you notice its eyeballs almost favor
the shiny black domes that cover
airport security cameras.
The housefly’s compound eyeballs
look like headlights wearing prescription
Coke-bottle goggles in a violent heat.
When your fingernail scrapes a lash or flake
of ash the size of a fat fly’s wing from your eye,
it’s multiplied several thousand times
in the housefly’s eyes.
The blackfly breeds in streams & rivers
during the dog days of summer,
but cannot survive on sadness like the housefly.
Bubbles of good & bad air flare in individual
hexagonal lenses known as ommatidia.
Each ommatidium functions like an eye,
but none sees spectrums of red or yellow.
To the fly you are myriad mosaics of ultraviolet,
gray, blue & green trichromatic visions
scraping something from your eye:
a tear of oil or sweat in some ommatidia,
a bud, a bead of mucus or blindness in others,
a pearly, blurry larva recalling
the housefly’s first dog days on earth.
When it’s this hot, you may also contend
with the horsefly, which is what
you almost think the housefly is
when you look at it.
The fangs of horseflies tear the ears
of the dog days. The sores shine
on the ears of the dogs like diamonds.
Dog days swarm the earth.
Houseflies rise like small planes
orbiting an inflamed, flammable planet.
Houseflies rise out of maggots like fragments
& figments & scabs & clouds of ash.
Praise be to the one housefly that does not flee,
the wind at bay gone violent.
You cannot shoo the climate.
You are multitudinous outlandish landscapes,
which is to say, you are more than otherworldly
scraping & scratching the flake or lash
itching your eye in the eyes of the fly.
You cannot shoo the fly.