Fireworks

This evening, the sky looks like a party napkin:

fireworks in red and blue spider against the black 

 

backdrop of night. A Cessna motor buzzes, too, 

a giant June bug on and off the throttle, 

 

and I think about perspective,

what must, from up there, look like palm trees made of light 

 

growing in fast-forward and then exploding—absurd—

only two hundred years since the first men 

 

rose into the sky to see the sunrise a thousand feet up.

Two convicts almost had the honor, their expendability 

 

suddenly a blessing.  They would have seen the earth

like a cubist painting, its geometric divisions in color,

 

just a representation of order, like time, but heavier.

I have only a few days left to be twenty-four, 

 

before time moves inexorably forward, and tonight,

distance and time are starting to look alike, 

 

with the same lit-fuel tinge; this is what burnt time

must smell like, a melancholy 

 

singe that can’t help but excite.

Perhaps we’ve been breathing it in

 

so long we no longer detect its sharp scent

in the evening when the honeysuckle and citrus bloom.