a fly poised on the sill where a shadow falls half bathed in light half my mind on the Hiroshima bombing seventy-nine years ago yesterday considering those who survived the flash shielded by some arbitrary cast of shadow jumping to fifty years ago today Philippe Petit who danced a tensile line between World Trade Towers gazing down into a gawking city from a quarter-mile up almost the same altitude as the detonating A-bomb and I think of the fly’s odds of survival under the arc of a swatter such a simple bundle of miniscule reflexes to be teetering upon will it launch into the light or break for shadow