Classic Poem

They are not falling so much
as intersecting — their orbit
or spacetime with ours — the Leonids —
at a closing velocity
of forty-four miles per second. Each time
you see it — the forty-four-mile
streak of incinerating nickel and iron,
and the second, a cicatrice
high in the ionosphere
on the fixity of our assumptions.

For we thought it a still night — white
frost on the fencerail and the only leaves left,
the oaks', motionless, where we stood
stargazing, out of earshot
of politics, commerce and war. Now
we are flashed new coordinates,
with the oaks and huge humps of the hills
and the whole country and continent
hurtling toward Taurus at sixty-five thousand
miles per hour — and, abruptly, our own
cancelled seconds and minutes
like so many answering streaks
on a runaway and oblivious blackness.











By permission of the author.