Charles Tomlinson

Three jets are streaking west: Trails are beginning to fray already: The third, the last set out, Climbs parallel a March sky Paying out a ruled white line: Skywriting like an incision, Such surgical precision defines The mile between it and the others Who have disappeared leaving behind Only their now ghostly tracks That still hold to the height and map Their direction with a failing clarity: The sky is higher for their passing Where the third plane scans its breadth. The mere bare blue would never have shown That vaultlike curvature overhead, Already evading the mathematics of the spot, As it blooms back, a cool canopy, A celestial meadow, needing no measure But a reconnaissant eye, an ear Aware suddenly that as they passed No sound accompanied arrival or vanishing So high were their flight-paths on a sky That has gone on expunging them since, Leaving a clean page there for chance To spread wide its unravelling hieroglyphs.

IV. The Fireflies I have climbed blind the way down through the trees (How faint the phosphorescence of the stones) On nights when not a light showed on the bay And nothing marked the line of sky and sea— Only the beating of the heart defined A space of being in the faceless dark, The foot that found and won the path from blindness, The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark. The soundless revolution of the stars Brings back the fireflies and each constellation, And we are here half-shielded from that height Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far Incandescence where the single star Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time. Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme With consonances unforeseen, and, gone, Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun. We wait now on the absence of our dead, Sharing the middle world of moving lights Where fireflies taking torches to the rose Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches, Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go. The adagio of lights is gathering Across the sway and counter-lines as bay And sky, contrary in motion, swerve Against each other's patternings, while these Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both, Trusting to neither empty space nor seas The burden of their weightless circlings. We, Knowing no more of death than other men Who make the last submission and return, Savour the good wine of a summer's night Fronting the islands and the harbour bar, Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it, Equal, in their arrivals and their goings, With the order and the beauty of star on star.