PLUTO'S LOSS*

on hearing of efforts to declassify Pluto as a planet

By Paul Guest

Little star, how lost to us you are already
and more to become, so small

that we here, distant and large and not ice
only, would demote you

to bobbin status, unplanet, chink of light
in a sky of major and minor

fire. For all your long orbit, who here cares:
some nights I try my heart at it

but little happens. The trees hoard a music
in them that must be locusts

aching to mate, to make more,
even to die. Clouds scuff the scarred moon

until it’s easy to forget you —
to think of water clotted

with green, where once I read Neruda
and Ovid distracted not by light

skipping off the scalloped lake
but by the memory of lace and sheer and bra —

by whom I loved. In that moment,
and in this one, I could not be

more human, to the dead sky
making apologies heard by no one, by nothing.

* Thank you, Mari, for introducing me to this poem!