Life is Beautiful

and remote, and useful,

if only to itself. Take the fly, angel

of the ordinary house, laying its bright

eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out

delicately along a crust of buttered toast.

Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest

dump where other flies have gathered, singing

over stained newsprint and reeking

fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate

ballet above the clashing pirouettes

of heavy machinery. They hum with life.

While inside rumpled sacks pure white

maggots writhe and spiral from a rip,

a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips

a living froth onto the buried earth.

The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch,

rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon

their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded

dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges,

a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh.

And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening,

husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening

and shifting within, wings curled and wet,

the open air pungent and ready to receive them

in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts,

a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost

children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents

soundly sleep along the windowsill, content,

wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass.

Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless

waste we make when we create—our streets teem

with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming

over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is

a purpose, maybe there are too many of us

to see it, though we can, from a distance,

hear the dull thrum of generation's industry,

feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing

the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing

like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder.

Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

Source: Smoke (BOA Editions Ltd., 2000)