Vancouver Lights

About me the night   moonless   wimples the mountains

wraps the ocean   land   air   and mounting

sucks at the stars   The city   throbbing below

webs the peninsula   Streaming   the golden

strands overleap the seajet   by bridge and bouy

vault the shears of the inlet   climb the woods 

toward me   falter   and halt   Across to the firefly

haze of a ship on the gulf's erased horizon

roll the spokes of a restless lighthouse

 

Through the feckless years we have come to the time

when to look on this quilt of lamps is a troubling deligh

Wlling from Europe's bog   through Africa flowing

and Asia   drowning the lonely lumes on the oceans 

tiding up over Halifax   now to this winking 

outpost come flooding the primal ink

 

On the mountain's brutish forehead with terror of space

I stir   of the changeless night and the stark ranges

of nothing   pulsing down from beyond and between 

the fragile planets   We are a spark beleagered 

by darkness   this twinkle we make in a corner of the emptiness

how shall we utter our fear that the black Experimentress 

will never in the range of her microscope find it?   Our Phoebus

himself in a bubble that dries on Her slide   while Nubian

wears for an evening's whim a necklace of nebulae

 

Yet we must speak   we the unique glowworms

Out of the waters and rocks of our little world 

we cunningly conjured these flames   hooped these sparks

by our will   From blankness and cold we fashioned stars

to our size   and signalled Aldeberan   This must we say

whoever may be to hear us   if murk devour

and none weave again in gossamer:

 

                                         These rays were ours

we made them and unmade them   Not the shudder of continents

doused us   the moon's passion   nor crash of comets

In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom   our dream's combustion

we contrived the power   the blast that snuffed us

No one bound Prometheus   Himself he chained

and consumed his own bright liver   O stranger

Plutonian   descendant   or beast in the stretching night—

there was light