Fireflies
In the dark, fireflies
above the tall grass, in the leaves,
over the lake, a circling fermentation.
We slide out
from overhanging trees,
our paddles disturbing
reflections of stars.
|The bubbles rise,
the green light of the bug's tail
floats up gleaming
below the blur of wings,
random, and not random,
and friendly,
and driven.
On and off
the flash of need
across the dark:
it's how I know you, that rhythm,
deeper than conversation.
Lightning bug, lightning bug,
we lean and pull
in a pleasure like music.
Our canoe glides across the water.
My face is hot:
that flame,
how I think of you,
ignites me
like the lights above the water,
my skin,
a universe of stars.
Judith Kerman is the editor/publisher of Mayapple Press. Her prose poem book, Mothering (Uroboros Books/Allegany Mountain Press, 1978) received Honorable Mention in the 1978 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award competition; it has been reissued with a companion play in Mothering & Dream of Rain (Ridgeway Press, 1996) and as a Storyspace (tm) hypertxt in Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext 2.2.
Updated 6/7/04
Judith
Kerman
3 Marbles
Paper, saddlestitched, 28 pp
$7.00 plus s&h
1999, Cranberry Tree Press
ISBN 0-9684218-1-4
