Selected Poems

Fireflies

“I hold in my own hands, in happiness,
Nothing: the nothing for which there’s no reward.”
       -- Randall Jarrell, “Thinking of the Lost World”

In the early twilight they come on 
like radar blips, rising above the blank fields
to show me what I’d miss otherwise:
the small, lucid moment 
when insects give birth, and die.
Of course, I know each ecstatic arc 
is just the green and gold wink
of electrical impulse,
and I know if not for the near dark
and the smell of the just cut summer grass 
they would not seem so elusive to me,
nor, as they extinguish themselves,
so beautiful. But I like this story.
Even physicists are saying now
some particles are virtual:
they come into existence out of nothing
and return to nothing so fast
they’re more afterimage than reality.
But for however brief a time,
they do exist. As the fireflies fade,
I trace their paths out across the dark field
and see a jogger in the distance,
a young woman on the street, caught for a moment
in a soft cone of yellow lamplight,
one arm raised, strong thighs poised
against her own shadow. 
Then the cone is empty again,
her afterimage like the green and gold wink
which keeps taking me from here to there,
even when there is nothing there.

(published in The Beloit Poetry Journal)