~
The Comets
The people we knew first time round swerve offside, out of orbit. We follow their arcs with telescopes.
And when you left me I lived in our former house alone, doors and windows shut. In the following years, I met you once or twice in dreams, nowhere else.
Such meetings are portents of future meetings we like to think. Or possibly flashbacks to former lives. The circuit moves both ways.
You wrote me letters every few years. I recognised your handwriting on envelopes. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away those letters, nor could I open them.
Instead, I pictured circling debris: raincoats, café meetings, circular conversations. I figured such things might fall for decades in meteor showers.
One day, I realised there would be no more letters, no more rumours, no more dreams.
I went outdoors, ready to speak your name to friends again. And I talked endlessly about broken clocks – how to wind them forward, how to jolt them back to life.
Folk indulged my rambling, and saw my eyes were still on fire, feverish, chasing the after-burn dirt tracks of things and people passing, all the time conscious of the spreading absence of dead stars.
~
David Mohan is a poet and short story writer based in Dublin. His poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Stirring, Measure, Superstition Review, New World Writing, PANK and Dialogist. His poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and won the Christopher Hewitt Award.