The comet has no wings, it is a falling thing,
though it’s falling is older than the flight of our angels.
It smears its image across the void, it doesn’t burn--
the ice in its hair is older than the ocean you dream beside.
It would have been so easy to forget that each new summer is like a jar,
some totally empty, some full of talkative wine.
Living together was harder before irony,
but there was still a place back then for glittering sentences,
a place to smash language on the first steps of the temple.
There were better gods also, full of imaginary blood,
with blue lips and the romantic habits of mantises,
they placed their children in the night sky, hanging them up
with dragons and other things that could eat them.
And sometimes fate would ride in as a single letter,
a live omega bursting from the heart of the wheat queen,
and everyone in the village would look up at the sky
and say in unison,
the harvest just gets angrier every year.