Seen from the bridge at half-past ten,
you’re a faint brush-stroke on the shifting
margin of evening.  Where the semi-dark turns
into deeper dark, you hang in motionless
motion, half-seen, half-intuited.

Broomstraw of the night!  Hard to believe
that this delicate specter, head and tail
fine as a wind-blown cottonwood seed,
is a three-mile-wide ice ball hurtling
into view every sixty-eight hundred years.

Thomas R Smith lives in western Wisconsin and teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.  His most recent poetry collections are WINDY DAY AT KABEKONA: NEW AND SELECTED PROSE POEMS (White Pine Press) and STORM ISLAND (Red Dragonfly Press).