Alice B. Fogel
Saturn,
your sixty-two moons with their long swooning shadows cast
across your rings of rippled gas and waves
glitter in cratered rock and diamond-cut
cluster off-kilter cliff-sided clump and shell-
white globe peal in patterns of pock and clobber printed
by debris crystal ice-crust water
your moons are accretion hyperbole a scattering of pearl
necklace spilled over that distant dance floor giving me
the slip the twirl all
roll call a show for the sake of a planetarium’s
gravity and matter
and if I were to summon you to come through the orbiting
space junk clinking its alien chimes
with your mythological moon names mere
nominalism your excess of predicates in the continuum
you would never in the whole
cosmos sink so low as to cross those light years to here
and now and if I asked you in your seven-year seasons to show me
something I can believe or use
you would speak in your epistemological
hot coal of a language whose translation can only take
hydrogen’s elemental form and your flung wide
astral cabinet
of curiosities could no more sway me nor change
my mind than the mind unrequited could find
a reason not to cling
to its own rarefied atmosphere or climb
its long eclipsing stare
Saturn you with your hexagonal storms your sine
and cosine your ovoid terribilitá you are
a fresco of overkill and I am not falling
for you odd tangent beautiful maya brilliant
bauble with your blood-metallic spell of the wild grazing
in the dark magnetic fields I know you
are nothing but galactic wind in a mirror
an untouchable body however heavenly far
beyond the lit river I wade into tonight
below my single and simple my one and only
waning and waxing changeling my back-lit orb
out in the open full-on flirting first in its game
of overt come-on then its hard-to-get my crescent in the naked
eye my sole beloved earthbound moon