Comet

There was a nail in her pocket

taken from a cross, and across the street,

their bodies were dancing like human drums.

The night caught fire and took flight,

a comet burning across my eyes,

and through the long hallway left by its tail,

a trail of mothers standing in their doorways,

watching children leap across millennia like fences,

to land casually on this day with its

six silver discs, glinting in the sun.

A dime chinks into a soda machine, and

I see her coming, she’s coming down

the sidewalk, she’s coming around the

mountain, here she comes, with electric

six string six shooter, or is it a bow and sling?

Tall in the saddle of a fender mustang, too

spent to want anything anymore.

Finally wanting nothing, now, absolutely still,

paralyzed with wonder or starvation,

she attains the will.