Meteor, April 2020
In the year of our plague, we saw a light. Like a plane on
fire, west in the sky, just after sunset when Venus and the
moon were trying so hard to touch. There, flashing on the
lids of the trash cans—sudden, moving, in flight—
something meeting its end, crashing to earth. I looked up
and said What the hell. Not Glory, not Thank you.
Sometimes they say
a mixed blessing, which means
you’re screwed. Or Careful
what you wish. I only wished
that the rest of that rock
would miss us.
Starlight, not night, and the leaves on the maple so tender a
green you know most of them won’t make it—frost coming
again. Light, light, green, and the blue of not quite night.
Our night lit by this startle. Or spike.
The hardest thing
is how the fever
keeps making you think
it’s over, then flares
again, a fire that comes
just before sleep.
Then sleep flies off
to somewhere far
from your troubled
crown of night.
After a shock, sometimes you look back at the place it
happened as if it bled some lingering print. I still look there,
wonder if it landed, the gouge, the burn. Mixed. Be careful.
Stars wheel down, a slow newsfeed. The story is
developing. I’m out here with no mask, big sky, big dare,
alone. And aren’t we all just lone pillars, the billions of our
parts improbably combining, surviving? Like those lights,
dragging all their lives behind them out of the dark.