Small Illuminations
(at Beaucaire-sur-Baïse)

The unturning sun-flowers invisible, vineyards plus noir
than claret from Cahors... it's wearing pretty thin, this high old

black-out stuff, as if the stars were light coming through
its threadbare weave, and beyond it another high bleaching sun

might be throbbing over Spain, and black specks of buzzard
remotely cruising towards noon, calling to each other

strangely like motherless kittens. It's late
but still too early for the aerolites' big display

when they'll shoot like pyre sparks or prayers, sprightly
on their way to nothing. Friends for more than half our lives

the three of us peer upwards into the space that says we
are little or nothing: I think to myself we shouldn't keep on

turning them into hope or fame, or fates to steer our lives by.
They've carried too much for us, our heavens
...