Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean
—Isaiah 1:16

A fly was buzzing near my ear
in lines whistling and thrumming
pushing air against my cheek
speaking in strangely agitated tongues.

A fly! I thought, forking my
clean fresh laundry on the
line stretched out across the
dank and moldy basement walls,
could only mean one thing.

The fly persisted—wings wheezing
and fluttering wildly against
my outstretched arms—zig and zag
between the flapping folds of cloth,
a room of pinging lines
weaving one point into the next.

A fly could only mean one thing!
And there it lay behind the sink
a rat’s tail carcass, peanut just
within its reach, its brightly varnished
eyes still lustrous with defeated hope.

In freakish choreography, its chest
seemed pulsing, squirming larva
in a whirlpool whipping beads
of jigging legless maggot eyes
a source of infinitely dancing life,
twirling and whirling dervishes
orbiting their host in blind
sublime prayerful devotion.

A rat! This death was cruel—the
luckless pest. I muttered it a dirge,
poor dumb, departed beast. Rats, too,
have souls—and for that matter,
even clothes whose skin once draped
and sucked the essence of our form.

I shook the rodent out gutted
and bleached, untangling its folds
unloosing trapped and twisted lint
and pegged it neatly up to dry
hanging my penance on the line

strung out cleansed and undefiled
missteps now spotless and absolved
we two—inseparably twined, renewed
and linked in pairs to meet
and drape an unmarred dawn.