Max Perhaps the last two lines says it best -lovely image -as a poem in
itself??
P
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From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 31 January 2007 02:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: comet snap
Chasing a Comet
Drive, she said, and I drove.
The dogs were in the back
panting from their twilight run.
I was a bit puffed too.
She knew it was low tonight
in the southwest sky -
McNaught's comet.
Grand in this morning's paper -
snapped from a jetty
on the bay facing west -
with awesome numbers
about distance and length
and brightness and colour -
but tonight's southwest -
discoloured by the city's
blurry electric aura -
promised ill for comet-sighting.
O well for McNaught
in his outback observatory
at Siding Spring
(near Coonabarabran)
where the air is clean
and the nightsky crammed
with all the brilliancies
the South is furnished with.
The lights we drove towards
resolved to tall street lamps,
transmitter-mast tops,
and what-not as we westered.
Its core, we told the dogs,
is frozen water and methane
three hundred metres or so.
The sun is boiling steam off that
and that's its shining tail.
They wag theirs, whatever you say.
We'd driven now far enough west
to turn onto a clear freeway
into the dark, under the new moon.
Look west! southwest!
Venus, perhaps, no comet.
The tail, some say, is three
million kilometres long.
And city lights conceal all that.
Well, patience, because this weekend
we're going out of town. There
on clear nights the sky shimmers
with all the brilliancies -
planets, Milky Way, constellations.
The weekend came, we drove to Newstead,
stopped. (We'd parked the dogs with minders.)
Why were people standing in the dark
in the middle of the cricket oval?
McNaught's Comet held their gaze,
its head pushed towards the horizon
where the sun had sunk, the tail
spread up and out, as if in falling
the comet had unzipped the dark
denim fabric of the sky.
Max Richards,
Doncaster Victoria
Wednesday 31 January 2007
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