Fly

A fly at the far end of my table. A rushed ground-level survey of where I had just been eating and then up in the air to land on the bananas, searching for some slight weakness in their thick skins. Then to the apples and mandarins, then to the chair. Seems late in the season for flies. What can it be looking for? It pauses for a moment on my Oulipo book. It sets off again. I regularly lose sight of it, only for it to suddenly reappear – on my anthology of conceptual art, back on the the bananas, on the brown expanse of a bare section of table. How much longer does it have for these circuits? Death seems such an immediate prospect – at once both evident and denied in the urgency of its flight. The fly is my companion this evening. It consecrates the tender surface of my fruit. It ascends high into the air near my clock. It lends tiny wings to the passage of an evening. I will be sad when it goes.