by Iain Twiddy

TUCKED FLIES

On the tenth floor, the night further below,
the wind like a wasp nest invaded,
sliding the window across—like a pane of ice—
I find house flies tucked to the side jamb:

one bristles like a kid with the cover
tugged from him, a tiny body-tut
in the brown metal bed like a channel
dug out to remain dust-dry for winter.

When did they wince in, squeeze through some pea-size
hole to pod here, like legged, haired berries,
dirt-knots above the ice-crackling city,
shouldering cold, seeding themselves into spring?

And how is it they begin to thaw out:
does the sun cut like a knife under limpets,
the frame bronze like an electric oven
so they pop like corn into the blossom?

It’s unsettling, finding them bunched here,
as if their six-month submission lays bare
like the window-thin distance between us
how I can’t tell now the difference between

how much and how little things want to live.

WINTER CITY BLOSSOM

I always wondered why people love it so much,
sitting on sheets, huddled in crowds beneath blossom
as tender and plump as sunset clouds overhead,
the laughing chat evaporating like champagne.

It can’t just be the mammoth winter, how it drags on
like snow chains, how ice clogs the roads like blood vessels,
or the thought of summer coming, given how cloud
smothers throughout as if the world were burning out;

and not the blossom itself, since it can’t be hugged,
can’t be plucked and treasured beyond the moment;
it can’t be the blushing way it suggests expression
of what remains tucked as a bud the rest of the year.

It must be precisely because it is passing.
Precisely because after a week it will clear
like the roof of a world in which the greatest fear
is that this year love could shoot up, its contents uproot,

and leave nothing of regret to blossom the next.

AOBAYAMA

Aobayama. The green mountain in rain.
The nursery gate swung shut, and the track
up into bamboo shafts then fleshing spruce.
And all the time, your breath pressing back at you,
the patter freshing off the see-through umbrella,
the thick mud-spits spattering. Up and up,
my narrow road into cloud that would never
slide clean like a rice-paper screen to show
Yamagata’s little hills, or even, somewhere
below, Hirose’s eagles veering and keening,
forever on the verge of the interior.

But I took my fill, nonetheless, of all
those slump afternoons, of the blue-yellow
yellow-blue flits between just-budding boughs,
and other leaves letting their drips like warm-up scales.
Somewhat aloof, somewhat attuned, knowing
the way down followed the long contour round
to the lambent chords of the water, the minor
fall and the major spirit-lift in those rains
that would never settle through the daze of May.

Aobayama. I thought I’d climbed clear at last,
north of your gorgeous, low-key affirmations,
your crestfallen revelations. I thought
I’d blown like mist into the will of distance.
Thought I’d said it all.
Every time my mind clouds with Sendai, I think
I’ll pass by; but here I am, sneaking a peek,
filtering through to the stream in the rain
of late spring, purling here, refreshed, replete,
content yet again to fall at your feet.