Pluto

In my 26th year
I left the planet that bore me. 
when the Sun had risen
like a golden fish
leaping high into the briny blue,
I put Earth behind me
and traveled light,
sailing out of my flesh
on the first good wind
and barreling tide, to pace out
my tether in the hub of the Sun. 
Those whom the darts
of wonder never fret
may think it odd
that on a vapory midday in July
a young woman
might take to the stars.
To these poorer souls, 
how can I explain
what their own hearts refuse?
My need to know yammers
like a wild thing in its den.
I see above me Andromeda,
in whose black bosom 
galaxies swirl like pastry,
and I am so hungry.

At night I lie awake
in the ruthless Unspoken,
knowing that planets 
come to life, bloom, 
and die away,
like day lilies opening
one after another
in every nook and cranny
of the Universe,
but I will never see them, 
never hear the grumbling
swoon of organ pipes
turning the Martian high winds
into music, never ford
a single interplanetary sea,
never visit the curdling suns
of Orion, even if I plead 
with all the fever of a cypress 
tilting its spindle limbs
to con summer, piecemeal,
out of early May.

Once, for a year,
I was of nine minds.
And if I lacked nerve
somehow, clinging
to every image as if, 
sandbags thrown over
and its balloon out lightweeks
on a flimsy thread,
my life itself might float away,
I knew the trail blazed out
was the way home, too.
How often my teeterboard hips
were desperate to balance
like a schooner’s clock.
If I left with the fear of Antaeus, 
it was not without 
the faith of Eratosthenes,
who dreamt the world round
in a square age.

But now, 9 worlds later,
I hug the coastline
of yet another frontier: Pluto,
a planet conjured into being
by the raucous math 
of Percival Lowell, 
a land bristling with ice,
grey and barren, 
where the Sun, nearly doused,
rallies but a paltry sliver 
of light, and messages take
10 to 12 hours to field
(imagine the cool, deliberate
chessgames, the anxious lovers, 
the crises exploding
between communiqués).
A planet-sized enigma
jogging in place, Pluto’s moved
little since its discovery,
touring the Sun once 
every 248 years.  
You could be born in winter,
and never live to spring.

We think of Pluto as an endstop,
or skidding out
like the last skater on a whip,
a land glacial, remote, calm
and phlegmatic.
But right now, while you read
these lines (I swear),
due to an odd perturbation 
in their orbits, Neptune and Pluto
are swapping places
in a celestial pas de deux
where the only aerials 
are quantum leaps.

If Pluto has a menagerie
of moons, we don’t see them
(nor, for that matter, the damned
wallowing in their slime,
or Cocytus, the frozen river of Hades).
No, the Underworld God 
keeps his dread secret a moment longer.
About Pluto, we’ve only 
the odd hunch and inkling:
theories pale
as the wings of a linnet.

When our vagabond skiffs
breech the outplanets, I wonder
will we have the presence of mind
to call Pluto’s main city Dis
(the hellish capital
Dante spoke of), or name
the ferryboat shuttle Charon,
the deadspace it cleaves the Styx.  
Perhaps not.
An ocean is an ocean
after all, whether it loom
from Triton to Pluto
or Southampton to Plymouth.

Where are the Balboas
and the Amerigo Vespuccis
of tomorrow,
hot on the heels of the future,
who will give their names
freely, as if to wives,
as they voyage the spaceblack
waters, always going on
with restless ongoing,
to the end perplexed
by the force that sped them,
and leaving only their names behind?

If Pluto anchors
beyond our sweep, docking 
far out along the midnight wharf,
we’ll braise
our frontier towns on Triton.
How eerie its floe-broken lands
will seem, with no pink and green
wispy trees of summer
or every so often a blinding white birch.
Could I face only the galaxies
coiled like cobras?

Surely frontier towns
there will always be, 
even if “town” seems
too fixed, too stolid, 
for anything so mercurial
as “frontier” to be caught with.
Deep in the mountainsides,
where the temperature
is least likely to skitter,
we’ll build
our snuggeries and hives,
be cave dwellers again.
It’s as if, flummoxed
by the shock of living,
we step by step re-stage it,
driven to the most far-reaching
ritual. Like a catechism,
we begin again: the cave dweller,
the trapper, the trader, 
the explorer; the self-reliance,
the hope, the patience
the invention: wrapped in our past
as we breathe down
the glistening neck of the future.

Forgive my brain
its wanton poaching
on an earlier estate,
but such frontier talk
leads me back to da Vinci.

Leonardo, come steal
into the chamber of my thought
again. How I miss
that nomadic mind of yours
always at red-alert
and surging like a furnace.
Often I dream that,
like a horse flinching
to keelhaul a fly,
I might shed the centuries
and give you a motor
or a fixed wing.
Had you ever erred into my bed 
and body last night,
I could not hold you dearer.

What sort of woman can it be
who feels at home
in all the Universe,
and yet nowhere on Earth,
who loves equally 
what’s living and ash?

I can’t seem to overlook 
the context
in which I live,
this collection of processes
I call my life,
even though the flower
be indifferent to my pleasure,
and the honeybee virus
dragging its genetic pollen
from one cell to another
be blind to my despotic ways.
One sultry morning
I found a sneaker-print
in the mud, whose herringbone grid
looked like a trilobite fossil.
How you would marvel
at the alchemy of line.
All day I suffered
that I couldn’t tell you.

The bread mold and I
have much in common.
We're both alive.
The wardrobe of our cells
is identical. We speak
the same genetic code.
The death of a star
gave each of us life.
But imagine
a brandspanking new
biology. Just as
when a window
abruptly flies open
the room grows airy
and floods with light,
so awakening to
an alien lifeform
will transfigure
how we think of ourselves
and our lives.
In my bony wrist alone,
the DNA could spin a yarn
filling thousands and thousands
of library volumes.
But one day we'll browse
in the stacks of other galaxies.
Given the sweet generosity of time
that permits the bluegreen algae
and the polar bear,
the cosmic flannel
must be puckered with life.
My bad habits charm me now
with reckless appeal;
we may be the habit of the universe.

Today in the locker room,
under the dyer,
threshing my long hair
in a wind that might have swept
off the Gobi or Kalahari,
I let my thoughts freefall
from Hercules, into whose arms
our Sun is rushing,
to the sky thick with planets
and ghostly neutrinos,
how through a telescope
color-flocked nebulae
look like cameos:
black and white miniatures
of themselves,

While such visions
and ripe polychotomies
waylaid me,
fleshed-up women
paraded by, whose breasts
swung like pendulums
chiming their hours,
and tummy-rises blurred
to an iridescent ripple.
Somewhere
far down the locker-row
a woman's voice,
like an eagle or kite,
balanced on a rising column of air.
I stepped out onto the beach
of our galaxy
and, as my hair became a trellis
in the solar wind, I wedded
that shining carapace of the future.

Once, for a year, my thoughts
gathered like clouds
into skycoves and jetties.
Entombed in a so-so body 
coloring, I was perfectly wowed
by the Joseph-coat planets,
the lurid gas ribbons
ad sherbety pastels,
Jupiter's organic chowder,
the saturnine rings bleeding light.

I consulted the Moon
like a crystal ball.
I boned up on the flinty
inner planets, whose craters
do-se-do for miles.
I steered by Sirius,
the effervescent guide.
I pored over our bio-heirlooms
like a medium
needing to feel the murderer's glove.
I winnowed, I delved,
I compassed, I schooled,
breezing from one delicate 
science to the next
with the high-flying rapture
of a bird of prey.
My heart jingled,
full of its loose change.

I return to Earth now
as if to a previous thought,
alien and out of place,
like a woman who,
waking too early each day,
finds it dark yet
and all the world asleep.
But how could my clamorous heart
lie abed, knowing all of Creation
has been up for hours?