Drosophila

 

On sleep’s slope
I widen my eyes
in a whiteout
of peripheral vision.

It is snowing
sunlight. Heaven
flares. Every tree
is singing.

As if I had scaled
a Redwood,
teetered spiderwise
on its swivelling spire

Drosophila—
you  ascend
your gradual
gradual grass stalk.

Your weight wakes
no movement;
weightless as if
stepping out to space

you reach for its rim,
that razor, stroke
the scythes on a
grass blade’s tip;

you shuffle, shiver
sure in your stance
stitch six sticky feet
to the perch

of its peak.
Drosophila, your mind
is moving: a fleck
in a pinspeck.

You flick out your fans
tempt fresh temperature
through the burnished
canals in your wings.

 

 

Only then with your
systems sated
the poise planted
perfected

do you dance—
your wings fire up, fizz,
flicker frantic flirting
gestures, flinging frequencies

beyond any hearer yet
you are yodelling
across a trillion
trillion peaks.

A swallow skimming the lawn
might yawn to you but
—no larger than a life
Drosophila, you invisiblize

your songs of courtship,
of fire-dances,  Love
teaching you to hide
in singing multitude.

 

David Morley

 

Biography

David Morley is an ecologist, poet and professor of creative writing at Warwick University. His new chapbooks are The Night of the Day (Nine Arches Press) and The Rose of the Moon (Templar) which was one of the winners of the Templar Poetry Prize. A new collection Enchantment is forthcoming from Carcanet Press.