Closer to Home

These flies on a white table burst

into shafts of light and touch down

again, sun-stricken,

the oil of their bodies breaking

light into all its parts.Not yet song, their buzzing proves

less than noise, maybe more,

horizon note or beginnings

of pattern. It suits me to think they have learned

to make much of the nothing

their lives amount to. What are you thinking? from "Flies: A Few Questions" Poised and buoyant, musing among ironies; alive to the psychologies of weather, night noises, mowing the lawn and putting it off; knowing the many mindscapes of neighbourhood, detecting the places where myth surfaces into a backyard or long weekend, where a situation teeters on the brink of art and "imagined creatures are making / real connections" - what is Closer To Home is domestic life that has been given back its dance, the bite and mystery that both provokes and eludes the grasp of the mind.