A tiny fly is moving over the page
of my dull book this sultry evening,
and it is my conceit
that it has a message for me.

It pauses on Rigoletto and,
skirting pronouns and prepositions,
lingers on the hyphen of orang-utan
before a significant pirouette

over rhubarb tart.
When I wake up it is still there,
making no sense at all.
Cruelly, I close the book on it.