Cynthia Grier Lotze The Comet 1. I want to tell you now that things are dire.  The houses in ruins are so many they are metaphorical.  Their rebuilding is a mission outlined in mysterious potentials.  And the bodies outnumber the wrecks of their homes—so what is to be done? You and I are so small, sitting here.  We talk sadly, and your strong love is not strong enough.  There are too many houses, the bodies of the dead line every street in every city. We cannot begin to talk of comets. 2. We begin even so.  3. The re-gathering thunderstorm now, and in the middle years there are things both measurable and immeasurable: friends gone, to God and other places—somehow I forget to speak of how everything means something else.  Again and again I forget the re-measuring, the frame for love and suffering, which conflate themselves.  They leave me looking at the lightless sky.  I forget, I forget.  There was something— it is the thing it is, like nothing else—buried in the dark. 4. Years before my waiting, years before my searching, waiting, renewing the search, my mother sits at a lunch counter, her older brother, an unlucky number sitting beside her. A dark hand appears, my mother's child-sized sandwich on a plate—the hand retreats and my mother watches the waiter's back as he moves away.  I forget, she says to my uncle, what do you call him?  Her brother, eighteen and counted carefully, dreadfully, turns, looking at my mother, her small feet kicking far above the ground—You call him Sir, he says. 5. We begin in the ways that small things must begin: rise in the morning, eat, listen to what is sad (so many things) and what is hopeful (one thing today) on the radio.  We have begun then, without quite knowing it.  We are sad or we are hopeful, but we have risen and eaten, and there is the gorgeous business of the world to commence.  And today it is gorgeous, unbearably so.  We walk over bridges spanning rivers, bake bread and fix what we know is manageable.  We think of the unmanageable and wonder, How are we to begin?

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