Fireflies

By Frank Ormsby

The lights come on and stay on under the trees.

Visibly a whole neighborhood inhabits the dusk,

so punctual and in place it seems to deny

dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray,

the porch lamps promise. Sudden, as though a match

failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs

trouble the eye. Impossible not to share

that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now

dalliance with night, such soothing relentlessness.

What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare

of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style?

Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss

such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves,

winged and at random! Our flickery might-have-beens

come up form the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be

as tentative frolic! What do fireflies say?

That loneliness made of light becomes at last

convivial singleness? That any antic spark

cruising the void might titillate creation?

And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground,

or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom,

for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence,

less than it seemed, as childless and deprived

as Chaos and Old Night. But ruffled, too,

as though it unearthed some memory of light

from its long blackout, a hospitable core

fit home for fireflies, brushed by fireflies' wings.

Source: Goat's Milk (Wake Forest University Press, 2015)

Summer Poems