Driving home, burgeoning darkness. 

Alone, 
but not: the light-tracings 
of the first fireflies 
I’ve seen this year 
slipping past, in Leonard Cohen-type
cracking-open moments. 
Full-dark falls & the
deer encounters begin – high-beams 
reflecting eyes 
yards before limbs can be distinguished. 
One such happening 
close, I think, to where a heron’s low & long-limbed 
flight path 
stretched like a sun-setting benediction 
a dozen years ago, as we merged our lives 
into one dwelling. 
The first I’d seen here, summoning tears 
& before I’d come to know 
their belonging in my spiritual practice;
when I’d only decades-felt an ephemeral
something 
in their awkward beauty, their akimbo grace.
Later, 
I will briefly wonder how this road 
came to have its name: a pike, for a creek, for 
I presume, a man? But right then,  
it is just the driving: my feeling 
sure-footed somehow,
absent that actual contact; 
the soft glowings punctuated 
by headlights, flicking 
high-then-not & back
again,
on my gentle way 
home again 
to you.