The Last Act

When the sun takes a final bow, its luminous gown glittering as it leaves the stage, and the audience stands, stretches, files out of the theater, only then do the fireflies enter, lighting their delicate lamps to show us the way out, and they hover over the edges of the grass like our smallest hopes, evening’s fading beacons. We drive past the fields in our rented sedans, windows sealed against the heat, we stretch our feet in our stiff shoes, the lights flying past, those tiny flares floating above the grass, we roar by, our engines, our wheels, our windows sealed, the fields aspark under that lowering curtain, and we strain to see them, wait for that slight hint, as if someone is whispering the word: fire. So quietly, so gently, so brief, it’s almost as if we imagined that bit of air, we crane our necks, waiting for the next flash, holding our breath, hoping, hoping, remembering those moments, when we caught them inside the globe of our clasped hands, put them in a jar, and screwed on a lid with holes in the top, a starry sky for the jar of the world, and we carried the world into our room, and we peered through its glass walls, the pulsing lights, the glimmering hopes, which we hold in our hands, which we watch in the dark, those flashes, each like a star shorting out and out.