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            Tiny Bulb that Drifts

Drooping decorative Christmas lights!
Lawn chairs dressed in blue shadow and nimbus-light –
Porch-lights – Distant illumination of man's cities – Raging
on clouds, on rivers, fighting thru swaying branches –

You dozing drunken half-moon of the lighted sky!
I, unlike you and the hidden stars, cannot outlive this earthen glow.
Listen to the stones slapping the river! the sound
of head-lights peering in the distance –
These impossible distances a man's light will travel,
and nations made of light when seen from a spacecraft:
This, our tiny bulb that drifts!


But, and then, the tiny span
a light runs
before it dies

The violence
of its path, the slight persistence
of its glow

The fires of the earth one muted explosion –
They blanket the earth
with a warmth that shrinks


And the multitude of shadows, the dislocated hands
littered on the ground with overlapping heads,
the dropped cigarette, lit, now pushed by wind,
how the sky starts to fall in, the first beam
of light threading through plastic bulbs,
how each bulb becomes invisible in the light. . .

It’s still coming on!

and I too am the fire that hurls itself through forests, on snow,
and am as wide as any star,
will burst through glass unheard, scud skies unseen,
whirl violent as a strobe-light

and I,  the irrevocable accident, the irregular Christmas bulb,
every bit as muscular, as loud, and insignificant as you, will enter
and exit the world, invulnerable, in one unnoticed instant.