LIGHTNING BUGS
We used to take an old lamp with the bulb out
And a steel wire from a milk bottle top
Twisted and stuck in the lamp to make contact
And run it out to the hogwire fence
When they were rising like static around us
And electrocute the lightning bugs in a shower of sparks.
Great power flowed in the current of our hands
As
we probed with the electric tip of our minds
For whatever it was in the core of light
That burned all day in the heart of things
And rose in the night, in the dazzling darkness,
And swarmed from the shadowy forms of the earth
Like pulses of thought - the white, elliptical ghosts
Of trees, the fiery tip in each blade
Of grass, and the pastures rising above themselves,
All in their own true forms at last,
Like the souls of the just. And we were plugged into
It
all
we believed and flowed with a power that leaped
In invisible arcs from the static swirling of stars
In space and the flames of unknown galaxies, down
To our illumined heads and out the sockets
Of our eyes along the wire to the fiery fence,
Where the bugs we impaled turned crisp and died,
Oozing their liquid jelly of light
While we turned green as fox fire, our hands
And mysterious fingers, even the hair and grain of our skin
Streaked and smeared with gleams of solid light.
And then, then we stalked through the dark of our childhood
Like
ignes fatui
following the luminous forms
Of ourselves, grim as ghosts haunting our bodies
Back to the blinding effulgence of home.
Frank Manley
