Ivan Head: Fest

Fest

I cannot miss the dead Possum by the hedgerow.

Its sharp acridity has a 50 metre range in still air, and forensics

warm RSVP to every fly, beetle, maggot and nano-phage

has been accepted, compelled to feast

on all the Christmases of this Magic Pudding.

Sydney rats, after their bait-fest retreat under the study

to stink-out the library keep-shelves with their own perennial wisdom.

After that plague, a late harvest of phagocytic flies

find their way up through the fuse-box to turn the house into a Hitchcock set,

flying and crawling by fifties and hundreds before dying like dried currants on the floor.

The goldfish in the pond await the tadpole festival

as the rafts of frog’s eggs float behind the reeds.

Years ago in another garden, a lily flourished by the door.

We, not knowing that its flower had evolved to mimic rotten flesh

in an evolutionary niche, watched it grow before the flies came.

Teilhard de Chardin celebrates his mass upon the world—

flesh and blood deflect to bread and wine.

In turn I shall be a worm and no man

become my own worm farm

or internal compostion engine.

Ivan Head