Beads

John Savoie

The beads zoom by swift as halo-
gen lights hung above the highway
tracing the broad curve of night,

till one bead catches between fin-
ger and thumb, smooth and faintly oiled
with ten thousand touches, pausing

then past, a balloon having slipped
its string through the child’s baffled hand,
lifted on wind and light, a dis-

tant speck, gone; or spark, expan-
sive, tickling through the whole wide sky,
the blue so bright it shimmers gold.

John Savoie’s poetry has won two Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan, including a special award judged by Donald Hall. More recently, his poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, and Rock and Sling, and his first poetry collection, Open Book, is ready for a publisher. He teaches great books at Southern Illinois University—Edwardsville.