And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

Song for the Flies of Fire

57 Song for the Flies of Fire The fifty-year-old girl of twenty said, “In love it’s best to be cynical.” She’d modeled, acted in French commercials, and sung rock with a group called “Soviet Sex.” Her eyes were cat’s eyes but without the mystery. Her smile faded like tired foam or like a memory of Berryman, who, when all he spoke and wrote was poetry, decided he was through. That’s how it ends with some. Burn fast, burn out . . . Even the repenters live clichés that guarantee oblivion. Grundy, who put himself through college selling marijuana, prosecutes for Justice now in Washington. Eldridge Cleaver shouts like Billy Sunday. Nixon’s cronies milk the lecture circuit, publish fiction and believe with all their re-born might in President Jesus . . . I think like this while watching lightning bugs play midnight tag around my house. 58 Ignite and pause. Ignite and pause— each one its own Prometheus, a sun in flight, a type of Edison. They burn like signals hyphenated by the breath of night. Each time I think they’re burning out instead of on, they burn again like pulses that will just not die. Their brightness lightens me. It’s no small thing to bear a dawn within you. It’s even more at midnight to create with nothing but your being plus a light that tunes the darkness something like the music of the sky. ...