Flies

FLIES

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS WROTE down the following words: "Fly past my ear; does it think I’m deaf?" Moments before, a fly had buzzed past his ear, and so he recorded his thoughts--his impression--on a piece of paper. Later, he typed it up as a two-line haiku, the line division between "ear" and "does."
Years later--thirty years later (forty? twenty-one?)--A.F. Caldiero swatted at a fly that had just flown past his ear. He wrote down the words, "Fly past my ear; does it think I’m deaf?" He was pleased with the poem.
The next day, however, with the lines still fresh on the page, he kept thinking about the words and the image and the sound. They seemed familiar, like he’d heard them somewhere before, like he’d read them somewhere else. The thought stayed with him for a good part of the day. Until finally, by nightfall, he remembered: He’d read Burroughs’ poem years before, but had forgotten about it until reminded by his own experience. His own shared experience. Their own shared experience.
He worked on the poem, shaping it, molding it, building and adding to it--until, at last, it had become something else. And when he was done, he scribbled at the top, next to the title, the words, "For Bill Burroughs."
Seven years before Caldiero had conceived his poem, another man, Tiny Montgomery, a non-poet from Woodstock, New York, swatted at a fly that had just flown past his ear. He thought to himself, "A fly past my ear; does it think I’m deaf?" But Tiny was not a poet, and so he did not even think to write down his thoughts.
Echo Hill, another non-poet, an Army brat who, growing up, had lived in Georgia, Germany, California, and Washington D.C., felt an idea come into her head with no provocation whatsoever. She did not write it down, but the idea lingered on for several days, until at last it disappeared entirely and went to wherever faded memories go.
Lulu Toast, while still married to Joe Pancake, heard a fly buzz next to her ear. She waved it away without a thought. Later, that evening, she wrote in her journal an entry that began, "A fly passed my ear; does it think I’m deaf?" She showed it to Joe, who nodded and smiled and said, "Yes."
In Antarctica, where there are very few flies, a glaciologist by the name of Noam Post, who’d grown up in the American South, suddenly realized one day that he had neither seen nor heard a fly the entire six months he’d been researching in the southern continent. He paused from his work and closed his eyes, imagining the sound of insects, and jotted down on a legal pad the words, "A fly passed my face; does it think that I’m deaf?" He’d never heard of William Burroughs.
William Burroughs died in 1997, in the same lunar month as Princess Diana and Mother Teresa (an odd, ambiguous juxtaposition). During his lifetime, he held no official titles and had killed only person, his wife.
Patrick Cole, an aspiring but not very talented poet, sat on his front porch one day, reading Sharon Olds in the sun. A fly buzzed past his face. He looked up from the poetry he’d been reading and thought. He wrote down the words that had come to his head: "A fly past my ear. Does it think I’m deaf?" He liked what he’d written; in fact, he thought it the best two-line poem he had ever written. He sent it to a journal he’d submitted his work to before (but had never been published in). Five weeks later, he received a letter cautioning him about plagiarism. Attached was the original Burroughs poem.
The six-year-old Amanda Foote, sitting on the lawn by the big yellow roses in the back yard of her home, heard a fly buzzing around her ear. Without much thought, she said, "Fly past my ear! Does it think I’m deaf?"
Eleven-year-old Trudy Foot, on a bicycle at a stop signal at an intersection in San Dimas, a suburb in L.A., felt a fly buzz past her face: "A fly passed my ear; does it think I’m deaf?"
Seventeen-year-old Mark Hoffman, reading a book from his dad’s home library, came upon the Burroughs poem: "Fly past my ear; does it think I’m deaf?" He liked the poem. He wrote it down, word for word, and handed it in the next day as part of his poetry portfolio for his senior English writing class.
Jacques de Gaulle, in Paris, wrote the following words down on a napkin at a café where he was eating alone: "Une mouche pres de mon oreille; este-ce qu’elle pense que je suis sourd."
And Patrick Cole, the same unacclaimed poet mentioned above, sat on his front porch another day, reading William Burroughs in the sun. He came to the familiar poem in the book. He remembered his own poem with the same words. Once again he felt cheated. Once again he read the poem. He read the poem again. He wrote the following words down on a slip of paper: "Mosquito in my face; does it think I’m blind?" Then he wrote another poem: "Bee stings my arm; does it think I feel no pain?" He thought about writing another, perhaps about a mammal or a bird, but discarded the idea and returned to the two he had already written. He read them both many times over before deciding which one he preferred--which one was better--and then he typed it up and mailed it off to a journal that had already accepted some of his other work.