Thousand: Five Hundred Fifty-Nine

to a tinkling piano that meanders up and down the scales and in and out the gills and touches here and there the fins of some old standard you can’t quite place but which is familiar as the insouciant compound eye of a blue-tailed fly. At the Battle of Agincourt, a poet once noted, a fly explored the protruding tongue of a young soldier. “Spring came to an earth soaked in blood,” Davey says, “and poppies threw open their skirts and bees poked their little noses into the blue fur suddenly exposed.” He taps the next light on the board,