The Meteor Shower
In the morning's empty hours, before dawn
reduced the world to a familiar size,
before the Sunday paper slapped
our fieldstone walk like a judge
rendering a verdict, we stood on the dock
as the heavens spit stars over the water.
How much did it matter that the comet
had passed through nine years before
the founding fathers wrote our country
into being? We were tardy witnesses,
swiveling toward the general store,
home of ice-cold ice, toward the church
whose cross had been knocked flat
by a lightning rebuke last winter.
Meteors shot through Orion's belt,
dribbled into the Little Dipper, blazed yellow
and ghost-green trails that shimmered
for seconds--or was it centuries? Time
had accordioned outward to its fullest,
a breath held at the point of pause before
contracting. We turned toward home
and saw suspended above our house
a fiery arc, a comma, as if to say
This is where we live, and when.
~Leslie McGrath |
