Smaller than gnats, almost imperceptible, glistening flies

hovering in their edgeless clusters

shaping and reshaping sideways through winter sun’s white light –

mid-air thrips emanating between shadow and light-ray –

thirty centimetres above damp long grass, matted weeds, cool earth,

visible and invisible as they swarm and float,

dots and instants one moment, noiseless aircraft the next,

homing for a place at sunset where they can land,

bubbling molecules escaping yet returning as flashes

on the eyes when staring at brightness: all of them exploding into an event

because they’re seen or because, momentarily, they’re intersected

by a slanted glare-effect which now races from the sandhill world

back here to temporary green depth — the flies coiling and startling

in soon-to-be-dusk air,

evidencing themselves as minuscules,

as splits, splinters, glints,

dots of grit between shadow and amber spandrel

tubed – no, framed – under branches of turpentines and applegums

and in that way, quite possibly meaningless, quite possibly

microbes of non-significance suddenly there in the bare world’s

sinking warmth:

microbes below significance as is any sense

of being that’s brought into prominence when the context

seems lost, non-existent, a flicker darkening

in which (no less instantly) you remember details too terrible to

bring to mind of, say, a car-crash or a house-fire

(even of a murder or of a child drowned in the dam),

details a person will never fully remember, never accepting nor forgetting,

for they’re details too tragic to narrate, too instant and cloudlike,

moment of shattering micro-second which your mind still scans:

thus, the 8 mins 19 secs which it takes this light-blip, this hillock

of incandescence, to arrive and settle measures a tranquillity

never to be borne – like the provocation of virtual particles dancing –

though it occurs every day in a glance, whether in grief, or even ecstasy.