Planet X

Steve, prompted by the cool images of Pluto being sent back to Earth by NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft, casually says, “don’t you have a poem about this?” Well, not yet. I decide he must be thinking of “The Waver in the Orbit of Uranus Becomes Unexplainable.” This poem, from Imagination Verses, takes its title and governing metaphor from the 200 year quest of astronomers to explain irregularities in the orbit of Uranus by hunting for a celestial body (known as “Planet X”) beyond the seventh planet. This quest led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846, and, more significantly for today’s post, of Pluto in 1930. Here’s a more informative source. I must have read about Planet X in the 1990s—when sky gazers put paid to this theory by recalibrating the mass of Neptune.

Here’s the poem:

The Waver in the Orbit of Uranus Becomes Unexplainable

I ask you, is it fitting to undo me by leaving
now that we know there is nothing out there
beyond what we can see?
I admit I’ve suffered from a “parallax of heart,”
born of a skewing jealousy and seen most evenings
in field-weary gazing upon your sleeping body.
From that angle all other worlds look bleak.
Though I will not call on heaven if you leave,
for I’m certain that the spirit is a one-eyed
pretender to the throne of pain free living
who has stolen all my daydreams for a shot at the beyond.

I suspect the water’s edge is enamored of the water,
a quiver on the surface tells me not the wind
but the wish to drift will devastate the sand.
It is the future’s focal infection, this insistence on death,
like when my mother and father cradled me
as the answer to each other’s desperate tread towards union.
For this is a universe where things are not apparent
in their cruelty, but continual, and the sweetness of order
is increasingly evanescent. If I could hide this day forever
from the pleasure of renewal and banish all contingency
from happening I would, but I have never seen planet X
or the wooden ships on the Eastern horizon.
Up until now my life has faced West,
sequestered reason reaching for an injudicious kiss.

And here’s the planet:

Pluto 2015