My mother tells me she found her first dead fly
in her wine glass last week.

“It’s fly-in-wine season,” she says to my puzzled
look. This as her happy azaleas bloom their
pastel heads off, and the pink dogwood shows
off in the front yard.

“Is this a spring thing?” I wonder aloud.
When I see flies zoom into my house, I know
it’s spring. Maybe it’s also fly-in-wine season.

My mother considers. “I don’t know,” she says.
“But recently, in the morning, I’m finding
a dead fly in the wine glass I left on the table
overnight.”

She wonders where they’re coming from,
if house flies are breeding inside her house.
(Possibly, notes Mr. Google, in any place food
is present, even drains and garbage cans.)
They’re also quick zoomer-inners through
open doors.

“They must have good sniffers,” I say, reading
that, sure enough, the little party crashers do.
Wine is a musca domestica magnet.

I imagine these short-lived flies breast stroking
their way in the wee small hours across
the tiny lake of Moscato in my mother’s
wine glass, sipping as they go.

It does not bother her if a bit of nature
drowns in her glass—”wine alcohol inhibits
the growth of germs,” I read. Plus, wine
is antibacterial, and, should they get that far,
stomach acid can kill any number of germs.

Honestly, at 92 and going strong, she’s been
known to remove the fly and continue sipping.

But the mystery remains: Why now and for
so short a season? What tiny timer inside
dogwoods and azaleas triggers such a
profusion of blossoms with such brief lives?

We puzzle on that a while, hoping once again
for reincarnation. Not as flies, of course.
Fortunate humans, if we have any say in it.
There’s so much life we have not yet gotten to.