June

At midnight in June,
Two days before the summer solstice,
In a damp creek bottom that winds
Through a twenty-acre wood,
Surrounded by tilled fields in which grow
Knee high corn and ankle deep beans,
As crickets chirp and oil pumps chug and chump
In rhythm of modern voodoo music
That fills the nighttime air with counterpoint to silence,
Lightning bugs dance among the treetops
In splendid celebration of love and loneliness,
Calling out to each other in luminescence
Of yellow-green flash of discreteness,
Being in moment, here, now,
An opportunity to continue the spectacle
Of love and dance and continuation
Beneath the stars in a cloudless sky
That continue, too, to sparkle for a moment,
A billion billion solstices
Dazzling infinitely forward in time and space,
While red Mars sinks into darkness of light,
Melting into the pale black horizon of earth,
As I stand, facing westward,
Big Dipper, circling Polaris,
Declaring the futility
Of impersistence.