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LA
BELLE LECTRICE
Above
the bay of sand and the birth-caps of foam
on
the cliff top on her side of the cottage window
thud
hopeless winged insects. Her
eyes climb up
to
them from a thriller’s pages. Fruit
flies, midges,
hover
flies, wasps, ladybirds—bugs, all equal,
leaving
little panics of fly-pats on the stiff vitrine.
Those
on the outside are breezy, those room-side aren’t trained
for
this plain defence against exit. They
buzz and butt,
butt,
buzz and thud. Every fall
to the sill
is
more exhausting, more irreversible, lasting.
It’s
one hell of a day, and it’s not those outside
who
are making them frantic—she is sure they cannot see them.
The
barflies in her book, inside guys, sipping bourbon,
are
into their deals, or they chew over dud investments,
grouch
about cars that are write-offs. What
d’ya expect?
One
picks his teeth and shines his shoes on his trousers.
They
figure out what they’d do with a yacht, say they had one,
or
what they could do with a plump bit of that on the sand.
Lots
of things they’d like are outside their covers, their showcase.
They
don’t bang their heads against walls.
They slug their shots.
—Well,
well, she smiles, do these characters have it better
than
my fragile, dysfunctional Diptera up at the window
who
are moored by instincts and can never surrender with grace?
You
are not only wee bags of squelch, darlings, she murmurs,
focused
on the sand and the foam. With
a fairness of hand,
she
closes the book on the old lags, she dissolves the window.
Alan
Marshfield
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