"As when by night the glass of Galileo, less assured, observes Imagined lands and regions in the moon."
John Milton, Paradise Lost V, 261-263
Hyakutake "The comet," reads the paper, "will have two tails--" one of hydrogen, one of dirt; one will fall toward the sun, one will point away. They say its head will look like a fuzzy snow ball, like Frosty Snowman grinning coal smiles out of the absolute some ten million miles from anything we say. But Frosty in tails? Wouldn't that look more like Clarabell the Clown? Great shock of hair sprouted from each side of his crown, seltzer bottle hidden till Buffalo Bob turns his back. Some Howdy Doody-- hairy stars extinguishing the dinosaur, granting us night skies mostly white dots on black-- And tails? More like horns of brimstone or fire; a skyshow of unavoidable choices, a Satanic track here under the Dippers while the Ides of March expire. Our scientists say this comet is ion gas and dirty ice, bright as a quarter moon, able to cast shadow from space, that in 10,000 years it will return just like today, precise as an eclipse, regular as Halley, comfortable as Twain; that omens, prophets, shit happens just like pain. They believe that pi will not repeat like a stencil, that galaxies are wrinkles on a universal sphere. But in my fit of darkness, in the underplaces of my pencil, in the shifts between one and zero, the suds of my beer, Jesus, Mars, and Jupiter-- I know I need something clear.
Prayer, Christmas Eve O Magnum Mysterium shoulder me lightly like a clear river carries an autumn leaf away on a current of harmony, beyond this concrete bridge of breath where brain tracks the secrets in this flesh of dog panting here before me with his three legs and thumping tail. Too soon his lungs will fail. Or over there, just beyond the road, another's child crushed between the wheel and the accordian of her auto pressed to bark of a green tree before gasoline lit all: a searing ornament to father's Joyful Season. Or further down that road a mother, things that made her cut-- a vain attempt to purify for Holiday, and so she comes to pass this evening a bag of bones and tumor lying in a bed , and all her boy can do is drum this nativity away. Pray? That she could run, like the dog in his dreams? What can children do for their mother but live? Or beneath the midnight star-- raw earth silent after the battle's pageant-- a shrapnel-clad soldier lies in a crater. A medic kneels over him; hands pressed against the sucking chest wound. His eyes search for the angel of any medivac to appear in the dark above and tally them both to manger before their gifts change back into ground. Only wander does wonders to relieve this beauty, this annual obsession, this thrust to blackness. Gracious God, arms reaching from beyond the nebula, cradle me gently, small wren stunned by the window, through this birth, this season so that I may again walk the village green at Palgrave and pause by the stone bench where grandfathers have celebrated solstice for eight-hundred years and listen to an acapella choir drift In Dulci Jubilati up the softening evening, "... Oh that we were there. Oh that we were there."
Rodger Martin
"Montezuma, O Nezahualcoyotl, Thou who destroyest the land, Have pity."
Angel Maria Garibay, La Poesia Lirica Azteca, 39