Watching Comet Lulin

I love the night sky: the star-pictures of the constellations, the waxing and waning of the moon, the great wash of the galaxies.  This week’s close passage of Comet Lulin, a beautiful and spectacular – and scientifically interesting – bit of celestial wonder simply couldn’t be passed by.  Last Tuesday night, the evening of Lulin’s closest approach, I spent two hours lying in my parking lot with a pair of binoculars, drinking it in.  As it turned out, I didn’t watch alone.  Calliope, my stray Muse-kitty took time from her nightly rounds to keep me company.  The poem is my way of holding on to the experience, even as Lulin streams off into the mysterious reaches of space.

 

Watching Lulin

Green-eyed and aloof,
you prowl down heaven’s alleys      
and lurk on Saturn’s doorstep with singular elegance,
a celestial stray hungry for attention.

Prone beneath your pathway,
stretched across a concrete bed with curbstone for a pillow
I squint and ponder,
consult the charts
and probe your space through time
until I feel the tug
and hear the tiny, worried voice.

An earthling stray has found her friend,
her food,
her solace
not rising tall against the sky but flattened to the ground,
eyes turned upward,
head bent back as though the victim of a fall.

Green eyes flashing,
she nudges at my pillowed head upon the curb,
pushes back my dismissive hand.

Earthbound, insistent,
she bites and tugs my hair as though to pull me upright,
restore her world’s axis
and right a universe gone mad.

Leaving Lulin to her flight
I reach out to grasp this nearer world passing by.
“Look up,”  I murmur as I run my fingers through her fur
and catch the glint of starlight in her eyes.
“A thousand years.”
“A thousand years.”

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The Grammarian in Winter

 

Grown to middle age, my calico is placid and content.  She spends her days searching for perfect napping spots, occasionally indulging herself  in bird-watching at the window.  Long past the enthusiasms of kittenhood, her favorite excitement  is shredding cheap tissue paper.  She prefers white, although she’ll work with colored if she has to, and each Sunday she gets a dozen sheets. For the next week she rolls in it, hides under it, buries toys in it and claws at it, until nothing is left but ribbony shreds and bits of paper.   

Despite her increasing years and even temper, she dislikes every sort of storm.  Lightning brings her to electrified attention;  thunder triples the size of her tail in a flash.   The approach of a winter cold front sets her pacing for days.  Once a low has crossed the Red River, she begins to move restlessly from room to room.  By the time it gets to Dallas, she’s tearing full-tilt through the house, circling around and around until she collapses in a panting heap.  She’s survived several tropical storms and two hurricane evacuations, and what she lacks in scientific knowledge she makes up for in pure instinct – she knows they’re bad.  When her people begin to fuss and mutter about systems still hundreds of miles away, she’ll head to her carrier, snuggle down into her sheepskin and wait it out: wide-eyed, anxious, uttering low, undeciperable sounds she reserves for rising storms.

She has a lot in common with her people.  When a storm is brewing, the air is charged as much with nervousness as electricity.   Anxiety and fear mix with a strange excitement.   Conversations grow a little louder, chatter becomes a bit more insistent.   As weather bulletins increase in frequency, questions become more pointed and attention more focused.  We may say we want the storm to turn, to dissipate, to wander and die, but we’re equally eager to see what Nature might have up her sleeve this time.  We’re like children convinced goblins are living in the closet – overcome as much by curiosity as by our wonderful terror.

Persuaded to Poetry

 

Months ago,  I published “The Surprise of Tiny Purple Things“, an essay about Florida environmentalist Charles Torrey Simpson and a pair of shells I found tucked onto a Texas beach.   The shells, a deep, rich purple, are known in scientific circles as janthina janthina.  They are, in fact, elegant and tiny purple sea snails.  Simpson had found a literal raft of them in the Florida Keys, and his chronicle of his experience helped me identify my own tiny bits of purple. 

Almost immediately, one of my readers stopped by with a request.  Her love of all things purple had been stirred by the piece, and she wanted a “purple poem”.  I don’t think of myself as a poet, and I was reluctant to accede to her request.  As it turns out, she does think of me as a poet, and was convinced  I could produce the poem.

We went back and forth about it for a few days, teasing one another, until she finally became insistent.  “Please do give me that poem”, she said. “I know it’s in there, and can’t wait till you spit it out.” Wanting to be polite, but not having the vaguest idea what a purple poem might look like, I replied, “The poem, she is percolating. Or, should I say, “purple-ating”?

I didnt’ hear back from her, and assumed our discussion had ended, until this appeared just a few days later.

“Ahoy Shore,
Can you see my right foot a-tappin’?
Bet you know why.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s small and shiny and purple and yearns to be heard (or read). I cannot wait to hear its voice.”