and being good to myself. From pilates to school, where for once, grades were turned in early and my writing has been the one good, constant thing to hang onto. The night is softening, and sleep newly-challenged but possible. Soon, I'll turn in, read myself to sleep and hope for kind dreams. Finally have the Tenderness poem memorized and for tonight I offer this:
Bioluminescence
L Candela
The eggs burn softly
in the earth, and when glow worms
hatch out, ravenous,
each one comes with a tiny
bright square of light like
the view-hole to a
furnace notched in its belly.
Can you feel their heat?
Their hunger for the tender
moonstruck flesh of slugs and snails?
2. Lambert
Sometimes at night, fire
flies are startled by lightning,
the tympani-drum flutter
of thunder rumbling the storm
home, and they all flash at once
in surprise—a quick
blinking open of sleepy
green nocturnal eyes,
a phosphorescent murmur:
Go back to sleep. It's just rain
3. Lumen
How vulnerable
we would all be if longing
shone through our bodies,
if our skins were translucent
lanterns flushed with yellow flame
leaping in the strange
and unpredictable winds
of our desire, like
the neon Morse code fireflies
use to brazenly flick the night.
4. Luciferin
You are a dusky
angel drawn to the gleaming
beam of my porch light,
a brief embered orange blaze
from your cigarette, sizzle
of sparks splattering
the asphalt of my sidewalk.
Your touch like sooty
moth wings, and I glow, suffused
with your heat, your scent, your light.
Copyright © 2009 Lee Ann Roripaugh All rights reserved
from On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year
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