Meteor_Shower Part Three
It is 3 a.m.
I am suddenly and inexplicably blinking and awake
This year my daughter sleeps next to me,
with her sleeping bag close and warm around her ears
Earlier, lying there looking up,
we traced out constellations
She told me messages she read in the stars
I saw only wordless points and figures of light
She told me, Daddy, you have to believe in magic
The earth, with us riding along,
has made its annual plunging return through the Orionids
Shocked and scorched by the sudden atmosphere,
a few of them end a billion years of silent flight
in a radiant burst --
afire for seconds at most,
but oh, the beauty
-- October 2007
River Gods
A building on the hilly horizon
was a distant castle,
the river twisted downhill through misty forests
toward unforeseen adventures,
dragons spoke their cleverness with a wink,
and that contrail in the sky
was a starship entering the atmosphere of my planet,
emissaries of an interstellar empire --
hostile or amicable, I would soon find out
... when I was a boy
Now I know
that's an apartment building,
that contrail is traced by a northbound airliner,
full of tourists and businesspeople yawning over half-empty coffee cups,
magazines sitting open in their laps,
on their way to another city
much the same as their own,
and the riverbed,
running with snowmelt off the mountains to the northeast,
silts and gravels its way on a downhill gradient toward the sea
in a very fascinating and scientific way
Looking down from the airplane flying over us
back to my daughter --
I see her splashing barefoot on the riverbank
with the dog
but she's lost in thought --
she's a Naiad; her river wends its way toward Poseidon and Amphitrite
Thank the gods
for youth
-- Spring 2010
Meteor Shower Part Four
Still awake in the dark
one vacation weekend,
we're sitting on the hood of the car,
in the warm breeze
looking up
She's jaded now,
no longer eight but almost fourteen
The starry vault of the heavens
has pivoted around in its slow entirety a half-dozen times,
through winter constellations and summer
Math is boring
One boy is jealous of the way she talks to another boy
Hoops dangle from her ears
Self-aware, she knows what her hair looks like at every moment
And she knows good coffee from bad
She points and says,
"Hey Dad, did you see that shooting star?
Do you remember watching for them when I was little?"
... Does not a forest
... remember the very rain that nourished it?
-- July 2013, 11:02 p.m.
Meteor Shower Part Six
My lover and I alone on a pier at night
Perseids this time of year
Skies clear; quiet chatting;
familiar late-summer constellations all in their places
An I-think-I-saw-it or two from the corner of my eye
-- and then --
a bolting bolide trailing bright green fire
fully halfway across the dark star-salted sky,
leaving no doubt,
not even requiring poetic license
Same week
my daughter
she of the footie jammies,
she of the 3 a.m. tent-flap,
called -- happily, overflowingly happily -- with the expectant news
and it all begins again,
another cosmic cycle
A grandson as third copy of the self?
Certainly not; we are all of us different,
paths crossing just a bit in space,
lifespans overlapping just a bit in time,
personalities intersecting at the occasional inside joke
and the way-back-when memories
and some shared hopes
for more irreplaceable brief sudden-bright moments
such as this
-- August 2022, 11:53 p.m.
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