Watching Kahoutek

When Kahoutek went over, trailing its long

glowing beard behind it

like some burning wizard on a jaunt of heaven,

some light-maned rock star streaking

toward the cosmic nowhere, we went out into the yard

with binoculars and watched it

in the darkness, hoping it might be an omen;

saying how sad that so rare a thing should be a nullity--

meaningless, except for the gasps

of the astronomers.

Thought, too, how the altars of our ancestors

must have dripped blood at this sight;

how fear rose out of the land, a long column

of petrified smoke that dirtied the heavens

as it had stained the ground; how the slush-sound

of knife through flesh had quieted everything.

We no longer know those red panics.

At best, we saw this silent visitor

as a seeder of planets, heavy with life-stuff--

making it another kind of omen—

but mostly as a flying ball of ice caught up

in an orbit so wide we couldn’t fathom it,

so far from us no metaphors could save it

for memory. Only the name would stay: Kahoutek,

like the gong-sound of a many-colored god

worshipped in a forgotten city state.

After a while, chilled, we went back

into the house and talked of how, millennia ago,

all those eyes must not have seen a future.

Certainly didn’t see us watching in their place;

how alike we would be: still working hard,

still loving each other and our children, still obeying

the laws, many of them the same, still shaken

by the loss even of a kitten, much less one of our own--

alike, except for this one moment,

this search in the overwhelming darkness

(for what, none of us could say): our mothers,

our fathers, caught up in the terror of something

that was not to be; ourselves, in the dullness

of nothing that might happen forever.