Poem - Elegy for a Gnat

[snoringdog]

A man after my own heart....

This is the kind of reverie I can sometimes fall into, expressed beautifully here.
First the elegy, then his explanation
---------------------------------------
“Elegy for the Gnat” (El Williams III)
----------------------------

Elegy for the Gnat

who drowned
In my two fingers,

denied the bitter
sweetness of a black-

berry and nearly
surrendered to the meat

of a melon, but considered,
mostly, the craft

of thirst or death
And tongued itself

goodbye.

oh, gentleness.
oh, small brown float

of a life. what news
should I give your beloveds?

most of them having
followed the rinds,

which too,
though I often forget,

Are edible.

blame this on my desire,

which only knows
a soft end. and because

I am hesitant to end a thing,
You’ve done it

for me.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of the poem he writes -

“I drafted this poem in June of 2020 while attending a virtual writing retreat a few months into the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Isolated in my apartment with groceries and things that were said to sustain me, keep me, as I stayed away from other humans, I lavished, as I do each season but especially summer, in the pleasure of fruit.

As we know, with fruit comes gnats and/or fruit flies. However, in the midst of so much death (Covid-19 patients, Black and Brown people being victims of police brutality, white supremacist terrorism etc.) so many transitions, and so much loneliness, my relationship to other humans, yes, but also, to gnats and/or fruit flies, and nature, in general, began to shift.

‘Why kill a thing?’ I began to ask myself, ‘The gnats are only visiting.’ Yet one evening as I sat to write with a gnat floating about in my writing space, I brought to the table two fingers of bourbon.

By the third sip I recognized that the gnat, too, had indulged or gotten lost or simply, through a combination of things, became loss.”

[Mental Fairy]

Oh I love this, absolutely adore it.