Ours

You know wonder by its silence. Pinsky’s ineffable this evening. A field that isn’t quite ours, darkness, clusters of lightning bugs. Get your camera out. I can’t catch anything, too dark. This isn’t ours to take with us. A lesson we’re told over & over but haven’t quite learned because of the delicacy of the reminder. We move the night as the strangers we are in that we leave the quiet to, finally, do its great work.

     Some nights our walk precedes dusk & there is just the waiting. The twilight’s generous pinks & baby blues. An exercise in loneliness, & once you’ve let it be still, a reward. Lightning bugs, fireflies, depending on the region. Nomenclature in & of itself a way to divide, but we’re brought together through observation, a swarm of conclusions bright in the way they forgive the darkness.

     We tell everyone we know about the field & the lightning bugs, & how we wouldn’t dare try writing them into a poem because we’d fail. A poem, just a series of failures broken down into lines, a series of attempts to assuage the self scattered about & glowing. Lightning bugs pulse, pulsate, beat, throb—all the glorious verbs we usually reserve for the human heart.

     They don’t vanish, it is we who leave them, as if that isn’t the first movement in loss. We leave because we’ll never understand their intimacy, because in understanding there is a slowing that would keep us from our lives.

     For a few singular minutes we watch the lightning bugs while we brush mosquitoes away from ourselves. & how many more sentences have we made with that preposition that keeps things at arm’s length, that ending of from ourselves, from ourselves.