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Looking for the Comet
You push back the sheet, leave me
naked and cooling in the night air.
You stand by the window,
by the yellow flowers in their blue vase
and there’s the moon on your face and shoulders.
“It’s here,” you say, but I’m pretending sleep,
and just watch you, watching the comet
moving off towards the sun and beyond.
A car passes. Headlights fill the window,
making new shadows, that rise, then fall.
You take a flower from the vase,
carry it to me in both hands, slowly wipe
the petals over my face. Now, I can smell
the pollen on my skin, feel the trail.
This is the first poem by Andrew Waterhouse
that I remember reading. But such is, sometimes, the selection
process at The Rialto that by the time we wrote accepting the
poem for the magazine someone else had grabbed it. We’d
been getting quite a lot of poems about the Hale Bop comet,
but most of them had tended to centre on the comet and to be
trying to say something important about Time and Eternity.
Once upon a time you could do this - Marvell’s ‘To
His Coy Mistress’ begins ‘Had we but World enough
and Time’ and moves through to ‘But yonder all
before us lie desarts of vast Eternitie’; more recently
Emily Dickinson came up with, ‘Because I could not stop
for Death / He kindly stopped for me -/ The Carriage held but
just Ourselves - / And Immortality.’ Nowadays poets tend
to be more oblique in their references.
Andrew’s poem seems only to be incidentally
about the comet - it is mostly about two people in a room and
their intimacy -possibly the lack of it (the comet is a long
way away). The opening is utterly simple and direct, but at
once announces the theme of movement - ‘leave me’ (
which is what the comet is doing). It’s impossible to
overemphasize Andrew’s awareness of what he was up to
- he noticed everything in his work, he’d know how many
times the letter ‘y’ appears in this poem, how
the ‘ow‘ sound slows the rhythm - ‘window’ ‘yellow’ ‘flowers’ ‘towards’ ‘flower ‘ slowly’.
He’d have enjoyed the recollection of Joe Cocker singing ‘wet
and naked in the garden’ that his ‘naked and cooling
in the night air’ provokes; this is part of the playfulness
of the poem, its yellow and blue, the light and the shadow.
The poet is watching his lover, the lover (while covered in
celestial light) is watching the comet, we are watching all
three. The ‘leave me’ of the first line of the
first stanza is answered by the ‘moving off’ of
the last line of the stanza.
And then he builds in another resonance ‘A
car passes’ is another source of light sweeping by, a
rise and a fall, something else being here, casting a light,
and then moving on. The two people come together again; the
lover has left, as the comet leaves, but now comes back, carrying
a flower. The comet, of course will not be back for a long
time, by which time we, if not all of humankind, will know
all about immortality. It’s not incidental that one of
the theories of the origin of life on earth is that comets
carry, in their ice trails, elementary life forms that could
have fertilised this planet. ‘The trail’ is a brilliant
ending- it’s what we look for in the comet, the track
of it’s journeying, but a trail is also something to
follow, that leads - to where? And look how with ‘smell’ and ‘feel’ he
brings the poem out of the ethereal back into the sensual,
the naked contact - the two people are back in touch, as they
were just before the poem opened. The attention to sound continues
-if ‘y ‘ is the consonant of the first stanza, ‘l’ is
that of the second . And there are fourteen lines to this poem,
six and eight, and the last two a wry couplet, classic indications
of sonnet form.
So, a poem about two people in bed, one of whom
gets up to look at a passing comet, is also, obliquely, a poem
about Time, Eternity and all those other poetical things; but
one written with a minumum of abstractions, of adverbs and
adjectives, and a refreshing absence of polysyllabic words.
Michael Mackmin
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