Hundreds of Fireflies

Sky yet violet,
shadows collecting
under the trees

and first stars wan
as night birches, the fireflies
begin: from the first,

the night belongs
to them.
Darkness brightens
them: from our screened porch

we watch their blinkings
sharpen: three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.
No winter
surpasses the flash

of their storm, no spring
their startling growth.
Expanding
to contain them, the night fills

with their soundless poppings,
hundreds of fireflies,
each arhythmic light a trinket

to entice some wayward mate
into the joined darkness
of propagation . . .

So it’s as wooers they come
bumbling to the cottage screens
to illumine palely, eerily

our faces, and but a creature’s
prime, combinatory urge
erects constellations brighter,

nearer than the heavens
will ever be.
Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best, is
what we needed.
For we’ve seen

stars enough tonight
to hold us through a year
of city living—

lengthening fall nights,
opened trees and the rosy
murk of shopping plazas;

and skies greyly gathering snow,
and the moon of crusted snow,
and marshy April skies clogged

with sediment . . . until the silent
drift of summer through the trees
signals us, drawn too by light,

to another brief firefly season.

Brad Leithauser