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Cheers to Hyakutake

49 Cheers to Hyakutake Everglades National Park for Carlos The last time humans saw the comet, man hadn’t learned to speak, you said, and we talked about them—us—grunting at the sky, drawing deer and their hands over cave walls with blood and soot. That’s all they—we—could do against all we didn’t know 17,000 years ago. Now look at us, I said, we’ve walked on the moon, mapped our galaxy, seen the edges of the universe—not bad. We were good at that kind of talk, those mysteries of time and space, remember? You pointed the telescope and fiddled with the knobs—Look, that’s Sirius, you told me, then asked if all the stars had been named. Probably, I thought, we’ve named everything: this swamp called River of Grass, under moon shadows of trees called cypress, watching the light of insects named fireflies, and ghosts of birds you said were ibis sleeping in the branches until sunrise. Names— even for what we couldn’t see or quite understand: joy, hate, love, jealousy. We were no good at that kind of talk, remember? We had no language for 50 those mysteries: two men consumed with one another. Why did we want to leave as much as we wanted to stay all our lives talking about Einstein, fractals, black holes, always the end of time, never the end of us. No words for that attraction/repulsion stronger than both our wills. Instead we spoke about double stars orbiting one another, one day colliding, destroying themselves in one dense mass of light, and we raised our plastic cups of wine to Hyakutake, its fiery tail tearing through the sky— Cheers, you said, putting your arm around my shoulder, We’ll never see anything like this again. Remember? ...