Author's Note: As a boy, I watched the fireflies on Harsen's Island.  The males flashed the females, and the females, if interested, flashed back.  Later, when I understood something about insignificance, and intrepidity, and the metamorphoses of earthly creatures made possible in poetry, and the Great Void, I wrote this poem.

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Fireflies at Harsen's Island


The group and the group leader said the wind
would never come to this town or to this,
so it was up & down the seaboard
until it was dead, dead as the basin
of human opinion, dead as the port
of Ephesus, dead as the once sacred
society that would survive it all,
its bright flags flying over the purpose.

      Word went out.  In the yellow oily smear
      of midsummer’s most profuse sunflowers
      they came from every county in the state,
      took ferries, came as far as Ohio
      to join the local farm families even on foot
      from the bar in Sans Souci with their evening
      partners they came, with bus loads of seniors
      to gather in the fields for nightfall & fairy light.

It would never happen again, not like this,
& it did not happen, so they settled in
for their stay—the immediate signal:
the popular ode turning on itself
like a leaf, a dove’s wing, the wind dipping
into the waters of old ports & clouds
like the colonnades of Smyrna shifting
to accommodate them, for those few

       who alerted others, altering them,
       blips like the shouts of city boys
       at summer camp into the dark meadows,
       the bending neon silos, the ballrooms
       with balconies of bright ideas,
       dithyramb of lantern-glow, cold sulphur
       spirals of nymphs performing in the shapes
       of their shapes, heads filled with divine objects,                                                                                                                                                                                          
one moved forward into the immense dark
as Zelus was led past the port & the last
sphere of influence, forsaking all others
on the journey of no return, the bold
voice exchanged for a dawn of ghosts,
they returned to Bar Harbor, Twin Rivers,
the one fawn-eyed farm boy with the fruit jar 
lantern & seniors in their gilded buses.