Pluto Contemplates His Next Career
by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Exiled by a fiat of all flesh,
a flurry of xanthine papers swirled
like Saturn’s spoiled egg surface,
Pluto,
little ice cube he is now,
creeps at the edge of telescopes,
still,
almost, in his progress,
dark gardener
among the Kuipers.

These ovular buds
unhatched, unopened,
wait
like strange roses for new lenses,
light to bend about them like a dress,
eyes at last
to stroke their unknown craters,
demarcate their curves
like Donne’s roving hands,
unlicensed,
and uncertain as the man who first
noted the dark spot of gravity,
smiled,
and named him a discovery.

Let them
draw up their contracts,
realign their charts,
downgrade him from a planet to a stone.
Pluto
laughs and swirls through space,
dark as fanged holes that eat the sun,
still mysterious
as any ancient riddle.