The blinking, flashing light beetles
glow worm, fireflies that we call them
send their sema-phore lightning signals
at precise intervals to draw their mates
to them and their brightness is enhanced
by the lack of street lights down below
the long ramp up to the bridge that will
go across the trail in a tunnel through
that goes over us into the cemetery
far away the darkest place in the city
and it is exactly there those glimmers
shimmer a resemblance to everything
rushing away from everything strands
of galaxy are drawn in by black hole
gravity at the centers of whirling spirals
the farther back in time we look with our
infra-red lenses the farther we see it
as if through our own generations with
everything moving away from everything
else more connected than ever and ever
all apparent from common epi-center and
disappearing into the cosmic pool of this
nothingness our selves absorbed into the
Cosmos that just flickers away in the night.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.