Stuart Greenhouse
Aphelion
Let’s say you are a comet
on the far swing
of your eccentric orbit,
just coming home
to the Inner Oort Cloud,
gravity desert of your birth
where, like you and unlike you,
sparse suspension of ice chips
miles or millimeters wide,
infinitesimals and planetesimals
in elliptics unperturbed
since the solar system formed,
tend each to their solitary path.
“Hello!”
you might feel like saying,
barreling up the old streets,
“hey, little bro, remember when
relentless tidal forces
spread their hands through us,
broke us apart, sent me
spinning, back when
PSO J318.5-22 passed by?” You don’t
look one eon older. Me,
not so much.
Each time I swing
down round the sun,
more gets left
behind. Those veins
of ice we share,
the ones which stitch
and node
the layered dust we are,
heated
by the sun’s thick flux
geyser and exhale, and
where they exhale
my features
evaporate.
That’s why you don’t know I’m me,
me who once fit you crag
to crag perfectly tight
as any mirror;
but listen, the only real change
between me then and me now
are the stories
I bring home
from the inside. If only you’d
stop drifting off, listen!
Your too-faithful
memory keeps
you from seeing
“I’m still me. . .”
You pause, you
don’t know how to say that
being in time you
now means being
not just a lobe of dirt
static wherever it floats anymore
but the bob of the swoop of a pendulum
caught up in trading, for the close illumination
and slingshot velocity of that center
whose ignition preceded your forming—
which still shines, though alien, distant—
deeper scarring each time.
Stuart Greenhouse is the author of the poetry chapbook What Remains. Poems have most recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Barrow Street, Laurel Review, North American Review, and Tinderbox.
