This is the Daily Poem on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I am Joshua Gibbs, filling in for David Kern.

My latest book is something they will not forget,

a handbook for classical teachers,

and it is available now on the CERC website.

Today I'm going to read Horseflies by contemporary poet Robert Wrigley.

This poem won the Pushcart Prize in 2005.

Horse flies.

After the horse went down, the heat came up.

And later that week, the smell of its fester yawed, an open mouth of had been air.

Our local world was licked inside of an eye, the boy who'd volunteered at twilight.

Shunts of chawed cardboard wadded up my nostrils and a dampened bandana over my nose and mouth.

I strode then into the ever-purpler sink of rankness and smut,

a sloshful five-gallon bucket of kerosene in my right hand,

a smoking railroad fuse in my left,

and it came over me like water then, into my head gaps and gum rinds, into the

tear ducks and taste buds, and even into the last dark tendrils of my howling agonized hair,

that through the windless half-light hoped to fly from my very head and would have, I have no doubt.

Had not the first splash of kerosene launched a seething skin of flies into the air,

and onto me the cloud of them so dense and dark, my mother in the distance saw smoke

and believed, as she had feared I would, that I had

set my own fool and staggering self aflame. And therefore she fainted and did not see how the fire

...