Take my hand, she said, and I lay my palm on top of her hand and she knelt a little,
I knelt beside her, and she waved gently, as with a wand, the small light she held
like a pencil, tracing in the humming air a phosphorescent J. We were in clover,
we were in jimson, in the field, we were in sedge grasses wet with the birthing
of mid-evening. I have been a biologist all my life, she said, and I love this more
than anything. J in the deep blue air, J J and the redwing blackbirds chipped from
the cattails around the pond and a jet glided homebound or outbound in the low
horizon. J she wrote, we wrote, and then a blink answered from its cave of curled
grasses and another came toward us in a funny sort of dancing rise-and-fall, and
I realized we were speaking, all of us, firefly and awkward human couple-not-a
-couple, and the wonder was not that they answered us. The wonder was it dawned
on us finally to ask.