I am Fly
and there is no God.
I am Fly, the smart, dark angel with transparent wings,
green and purple eyes.
I need no one.
Still I confess
I’m drawn to the calling of a violin, the fragile
shoulders, the tight wire of a female voice.
I swoop through the air to find it, enter it, probe it,
gorge
and purge.
I am fly, so
naturally I’m curious.
I alone am why, my ownmost teleos.
draw my own circles,
lived in Miro’s brain,
annoyed Wittgenstein with the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t
uncertainties,
went for a swim in the tea in T. S. Eliot’s cup.
Now this doll thinks that I don’t know she’s there;
the she doll in her doll house waiting rooms, waits,
her eternal torment, expectation,
and gazes blankly to the end of the earth’s last spasm.
Desolation and de-
composition.
Oh I am in love. I am Fly—
vertiginous, sumptuous, prodigious!
I never blink
and have no memories.
I interrogate at random.
Born on a dead star, abandoned nest
of obscurity and contamination, dreamed
into existence by the very thing I seek, the void, woman,
crossing and uncrossing her legs. There
is my altar, there
the silk trampoline
my vault and somersault
my dart and thrust
the anonymous bed…
There I alight and play with her hair, the strings of music
in sugary blue light
snaking through the air
like frankincense, glass
bodies of illuminated saints, in pieces, watching,
but who can’t see with their glass eyes
the vague bed
woven just for me, the white or black of a woman’s skin
and many arms
of memories, poor motherless cross,
bright compass of snow.
I am Fly. I fly and nurse,
lips black and pursed—eyes more languorous auras of the blood tumescent
with the images of crimes—eyes panoramic
technicolor eyes that see beyond the halo of horizons to apocalypse.
I have carried the plague in my hands to the sleepless.
Now let me be entwined in her bandages,
wound round in silk
and spun into another world.
Let me dissolve in her blood, her waiting rooms, her bog
of paradise.
Infinitesimal speck of excrement, I sign my name
and who can say that I was ever here?
Who?
to allow me the last supper
which anyway I can’t eat and would spit out
like a bitter moon upon my sticky tongue,
a small, flat world of desert languages
and the stale, moldy bodies that spoke them.
Was a time the world buzzed with it, laughing at a joke
inside a womb,
but the promised land is a desert now, or
cathedral where, I gather,
some savior lies, guarded like a lock
of baby hair.
The first shall be last, saith Fly.
Whatever that means.
Marlon L. Fick is the author of six books (of poetry, short fiction, translation, and novels). He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts from three countries (The United States, Mexico, and Spain). Currently, he resides in Arizona where he is the Chair of Creative Writing at Navajo Technical University.