halley’s comet, 1986

Christina Lux

San Jacinto Mountains & San Joaquin Valley, California

were you watching too as she flew? 
from the barbed wire fence along the canal? 
could you catch her solar-wind-tail? 
did you know she orbits reverse? 
did you spy her rainfire of shooting stars? 
did the sonic boom echo from our shell? 

they say we can tell a star's age 
by how fast it spins. 

could we spin until she passes again, 
binary stars born of a great collapse, 
orbiting one center of mass? 

The Science

This poem was inspired by waking up early one morning in 1986 at 9 years old to watch Halley's Comet from a mountaintop in Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains of southern California.  In the first stanza, I imagine a close friend I had just left behind in the San Joaquin Valley of California watching it at the same time, from a spot where we used to watch B52s fly by overhead from nearby Castle Air Force Base. I returned to the San Joaquin Valley as an adult and the second stanza reflects on ageing as a form of emergence – both human and astral, with the final stanza reflecting on how both stars and humans can be bound across time and space. The poem's connection to the theme of "emergence" is tied to both the periodic emergence of Halley's Comet in our field of vision here on earth, ageing as emergence, and the emergence of binary stars.

The Poet

Christina Lux is a poet and scholar based at the University of California, Merced, where she is Managing Director of the Center for the Humanities. Her primary field of research is war literature in sub-Saharan Francophone Africa. Her poetry has appeared on National Public Radio and in The Houston Chronicle as well as in journals such as Feminist Formations and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her scholarship has appeared most recently in BioScience - an article on how poetry can enhance creativity and innovation in conservation science. Her book of poetry, War Bonds, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.

Next poem: Headstarting by Andrea Joy Adams