Somebody has vanished, and everyone in the poem has a theory. Cometina disappears in November, flickers back for a single day in April, and is gone again by January. The speaker is left with a pile of rumours and no facts. The poem never says who Cometina is. A friend, a pet, a lover and a child would all fit what we are given, and that silence is part of the effect. We are not told what is missing, only that the speaker wants it back.
The name does a lot of quiet work. "Cometina" suggests a comet, and comets are the classic things that come and go, arriving unannounced and staying only briefly in view. That is an inference from the name rather than something the poem states, but the pattern of the story supports it: a sudden absence, a return "If only for a day," then another disappearance. The speaker is left watching the sky for something that keeps its own timetable.
The poem is built on a calendar. November, April and January mark the stages of the loss, and the gaps between them show how long the speaker has been waiting. Each month brings a new story, always introduced as hearsay: "Some say you / Took the train to Australia," "I've heard stories / That you ran to Africa." The speaker never names the sources. They are just "some" and later "them," a vague crowd of people who talk confidently and know nothing.
The form suits this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The short lines read like speech, with the speaker half thinking aloud. Punctuation carries the emotion: the ellipsis in "But can that be?..." is a hesitation, and the exclamation mark in "But that's impossible!" is a flash of impatience. The speaker keeps arguing with the rumours, and the argument sounds like someone talking to themselves late at night. The turn comes in the plain flat lines "And yet / This isn't helpful / I still have no idea / Where you could be." Here the comedy drops away. Debunking the stories has not made the speaker feel any better, because the real problem was never the rumours but the absence.
The ending is a small piece of comic engineering. In the last stanza the speaker tells "them" that Cometina can't have run to Africa "Across the ocean," and is "dismissed as crazy." The irony is that the speaker, who is the only one reasoning, is the one called mad, while the people repeating impossible stories are taken seriously. Then comes the closing line, "Guess it's a good thing / I didn't tell them / There is no train to Australia." It is also the longest sentence in the poem, so it lands like a punchline. The speaker has kept back an even more obvious objection, because one dose of reason has already cost them their credibility. The joke is also slightly odd, since earlier the speaker only said "I think not" to the train, and the certainty is new. It could be read as a private conclusion arrived at in the gap between stanzas, or as exasperation finally breaking through.
The key words are the small, deflating ones. "Guess," "helpful," "crazy" and "idea" are casual, everyday words, and they keep the tone light on the surface. Underneath, a person is admitting they do not know where someone they care about has gone. The repeated address, "Cometina," opens both halves of the poem like a name called out into an empty room, and nobody answers it.
The poem is worth reading for how it handles uncertainty. It takes the situation where no one knows the truth and everyone invents an answer, and it shows how foolish the invented answers become: a train that does not exist, a run across an ocean. By treating that foolishness with humour, the poem lets a quieter feeling slip through without announcing it. We laugh at the rumours, then notice that the speaker has been left with nothing better. For a short piece in plain language, it says something accurate about waiting, and about how people fill silence with noise because not knowing is harder to bear.