Ten times the size of Earth, Planet X is thought
	to circle the sun beyond the Kuiper Belt.

This planet is not welcoming.
There is no running here, each step a trudge,	
nor can we breathe its air.

From here the sun’s a giant among stars
but gives no heat. We live under
plastic, read by artificial light, a greenhouse world
divorced from the dark plains and hills outside.

The only foods we grow grow underground—
root vegetables and grubs, the grub we eat.

The legend says we came from planet Earth,
shipped out when all the inner worlds gave way
a thousand generations back. 

Here on the system’s edge one year takes many lives,
and slowed by this widow’s monstrous gravity
we live deliberately, a tortoise life.

The only dance we do is laggardly
and making love may take us several nights.

Each month evokes its own philosophy. 
The present is an existential one.

The children here can ply no other path, 
so there’s no need to write our history.
Let them be whole and wholly of this mass,	
thriving on dreams and weighty artifice. 
                        

The dogs bark out a fever in the blood
beginning to understand winter, its
persistence like a door between the other
seasons. Evening turns to stone. The crunch
of snow beneath my skis is a gloat of sound
suspended out beyond the reasons men
invent, those little harbors of rescue:
like the unclean kitten I brought
home and gave a name to,
set out milk on the back porch steps in a yellow bowl.

She grew, I grew, and soon
on newsprint in a cardboard box
other kittens tumbled out of her: wet
knobs in need of a tongue.
Oh sunset and bacon kitchen of my
childhood, dark, sticky house well rid
of your love! where a perfumed corpse
strung up each night in the hallway
whispered the rabbi's wife
had been unfaithful in Elmira,

where youngest of five male cousins
I must crawl beneath the porch to retrieve another
mildewed tennis ball. Now
the stammerer's lonely rituals
of paraphrase flex my tongue. One day
I saw her leap above my head,
claw down a ruby-throated hummingbird.
Under a mound in the back of the yard
I buried the bird. The hole
it left in air has followed me here.

Here sun strikes sparks in the budded
branch-tips and the eye, cutting
between black flakes, eases toward a dangerous
array. There at the height of a spruce
an obsidian raven roosts, earth-arrow
targeting the moon. The moon
a shattered brightness entangled in the pink
edges of a cloud in the deep blue evening sky,
winter melting, sunset
flowering over the damp brown earth forever