Reverie
Karla Linn Merrifield
My comets are like cats.
They have long tails, and they
do precisely
what they want.
They sometimes follow
trails to Earth, gravel ones,
preferably en France
so they can be called by poètes
names such as Comète de la Chatte,
and be teased to answer.
I leave to astronomers
their Halleys and Hale-Bopps;
Mine are rarer, more elusive ones,
they pass like lightning with quick
electric prints as tiny as firefly toes at dusk.
I go there across the footbridge
through a worn stone portal
in mid-afternoon, walk many hours
into the woods, le forêt. I wait
in the hushed understory
among bare, weeping vines
until dark, la nuit.
Then comes my little pet, ma petite,
and comes her light through the ice
and dust of inner space. I am
lost and found in exotic thought.
Quelle reverie! And to think it comes
there to me and I to it
beyond the mortised doorway
only a few steps away.
In eccentric orbit it pulls me
into its delicate, its très romantique
and far-flung imagination, certainement.
They have long tails, and they
do precisely
what they want.
They sometimes follow
trails to Earth, gravel ones,
preferably en France
so they can be called by poètes
names such as Comète de la Chatte,
and be teased to answer.
I leave to astronomers
their Halleys and Hale-Bopps;
Mine are rarer, more elusive ones,
they pass like lightning with quick
electric prints as tiny as firefly toes at dusk.
I go there across the footbridge
through a worn stone portal
in mid-afternoon, walk many hours
into the woods, le forêt. I wait
in the hushed understory
among bare, weeping vines
until dark, la nuit.
Then comes my little pet, ma petite,
and comes her light through the ice
and dust of inner space. I am
lost and found in exotic thought.
Quelle reverie! And to think it comes
there to me and I to it
beyond the mortised doorway
only a few steps away.
In eccentric orbit it pulls me
into its delicate, its très romantique
and far-flung imagination, certainement.
Listen to Karla read the poem here:
Working notes
“Reverie” arrived on the page as a great surprise. I’d been staring at a photograph by Rochester (NY) poet Anita Augusen. It was her image of a mortised doorway that drew me in, but what lurked beyond – that comet-cat – invited me into a world swirling with lovely French words that beckoned to me, that I’d forgotten I once knew, years ago when I’d studied French in university. I could not allow my unusual daydream to go unrecorded. Mais non!
About the author
A seven-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had some 400 poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has ten books to her credit, the newest of which are Lithic Scatter and Other Poems (Mercury Heartlink) and Attaining Canopy: Amazon Poems (FootHills Publishing). Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry is Athabaskan Fractal and Other Poems of the Far North. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) received the 2009 Eiseman Award for Poetry and she recently received the Dr. Sherwin Howard Award for the best poetry published in Weber - The Contemporary West in 2012. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye (www.centrifugaleye.com), a member of the board of directors of TallGrass Writers Guild and Just Poets (Rochester, NY), and a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poet, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com.