There will be two comets this year, they say;
Neither of which we’ll ever see again
Or so they theorise - nothing is certain,
After all. Things come around again.
The earth itself, cold as a comet today,
And the snow trails drifting out there
From upright rocks around the pond
Ice glazed as it rotates around its poles
Snow drifting across the garden in the wind
Like the cold tails of oscillating comets
“An eemis stane in a Yowdendrift”
Singing, bumbling endlessly through space
Many times I have been cold enough myself
To mine, and to those in my atmosphere,
To make the planets wobble in their spheres;
My eccentric orbit trailing wreckage across
The night sky of my life; so many ruined skies
And now the comets scar the spheres
And there are drifts in snow,
The snow, beneath which each of our cats lies.
Winter, the ice-world; vast clouds of lights
Caught in the bare trees like the fishes
In a stargazy heaven, jewels in a blue fire
A net four billion years old, pointing this way and that
While the singing gas and vapour bumbles on,
Always inexorable, on its path towards the sun
With no idea of our years, no concept of wise men,
Staring and pointing in the desert,
Or dinosaurs distracted by their light,
Crashing in swampy undergrowth.
This gift you gave me, Mam, my atoms,
Are gas and vapour, this wheelchair
Genes that made me what I am tonight,
Were forged in fires of Aldebaran.
I was my own comet, my coding
Carried by celestial messengers
Long before your atoms became you
Or Galileo even put his quill to parchment.
Your atoms became you, carbon hardening,
To points, as jewels become a woman,
A woman with a gift to give, pearls on a box of sky,
A gift with only one slight imperfection,
One bit missing, so as not to offend God.
Giver and taker of all gifts.
And back in autumn, back even before I knew
Two comets due this year would lace the skies
With stitching through the fabric of the night,
Even before the Mayans said the world would end,
My friends found, in dead November’s garden,
A shuttlecock wedged high in winter branches
Caught like a star, a perpetual comet, in a bare net,
Tending always back towards the joy of summer.
Sometimes the portent isn’t realised, interpreted,
Till long, long afterwards, after the comet has left;
After it’s whistled off again into the dark.
The radiation cast by stardust slow to spark.
Well, Mam, we’ll both be gone, and so will many men,
Before the year of comets comes again,
But come again it must – it surely must;
God made us both of singing cosmic dust.
Inevitably comets will be back;
Their permanence, the comfort that I lack.
