After Rain, Approaching Solistice

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief . . . for a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
                                                            — Wendell Berry

December, Something Lit

Night. A loose bead of light
in the garden, bright, then dim,
bright again in the mulch,
a pulse. Another dark morning,
it’s there on the deck, too.

The beam of a flashlight
finds a glowworm, a larva, homely
and gone dull in artificial glare,
consuming the golden gel, still as ice,
of a banana slug.

I don’t know what illuminates
a glowworm, chemicals I’ve read,
but maybe it’s only desire.

I’m at that time of life
where something is always flaring
or extinguishing.

I bring a fir into the house,
trunk cut and sappy, feed it tapwater,
twist silver and gold into its branches.
I’ve done this many times. Now so happy
to be doing it again. Now so happy
because I may not do it again.

There is light and hunger
all around us that we never see.

There is also the glistening path
slicking leaves, gumming ferns, up the trellis,
winding below the threshold we step through
each day, life proving itself
over and over. I used to have antennae,
I might have climbed that tree.