The Ghosts of Fleas   After the painting by William Blake   Ah, the hooked tongues, the bristly thighs, those simple popping eyes that stare into their bowls,   empty now—no longer will these barber-surgeons let our blood; instead, rising in their hundreds   from above the house, a flicking, swelling extinction rite on August’s Blue Moon. And still our nerve-ends   jittered, maggot dreams creeping through the curtains— the unconscious mind knows the prisoner’s lice,   the cadaver’s wavy flesh. Be gone you carpet-dwelling fiends; be gone you leaping suckers!   This exorcism by a lethal gas that…