Cometary Love

by Brett Rutherford

My solitude is astronomical.
One time I loved, I loved a comet-star:
once seen, once held, once even bonded to,
he flew away to some outer orbit.
Long is the wait until he comes again;
chances are good that I’ll be dead before
earthward swings his next perihelion.

But now that Hubble’s eye has caught me up,
I learn that things are more dire than I thought:
I am a comet, too, not rooted to earth,
not anywhere near the warm small orbits
of the inhabited worlds. My folly
was to lock my ice-shagged eyes on someone
just as cold, remote and inarticulate.
We each mistook the sun’s fire as our own
as we grazed by one another, flirting
with borrowed heat and false radiation.

On earth, a double comet was double-doom
to tyrants and to religious zealots;
to us it was a candle-lit romance.
I thought you fled from me; you thought I fled.
Each in our own ellipse we sped away.
Now I am told just what the odds might be
that we might ever come so close again,
or even — just imagine that — collide.

Not for an eternity of orbits
will such a thing occur. In fact, the sun
is on its own death-calendar. In flame
and supernova flash all will be burnt.

Whatever made me think I was a man,
and that I, a poet, a flaming star
could woo and win with words and rapt glances?
Who could, with sonnets, defeat gravity?