pluto, neptune and venus

I can’t say I had any particular attachment to Pluto, so I really have no feelings about its downgrading. Some people are upset (though it's not like Pluto is gone - and it's also not like you could ever see it with the bare eye). But all the talk about it has brought to mind a piece I read earlier last year by Damon Krukowski, a poet, musician and editor who lives in Cambridge. It's oddly prescient.

VENUS AND NEPTUNE

Astrologists have long maintained that the planets each revealed themselves only when they were ready to be seen. Neptune, shrouded in mist and fog, was discovered in the 1840s, as Romanticism took its own damp form. Pluto, dark and stony, was first sighted in 1930, ushering in a cold age of Fascist evil. So perhaps it should not have come as such a surprise when the planets began to disappear. Pluto was the first to vanish, a blow to science but for many a great relief. Restored to its rotation of eight, the solar system seemed more elegant, Victorian, and high minded. But then Saturn, Uranus, Mars, Mercury, and finally the great Jupiter also vanished from the sky. Foggy Neptune and lovely Venus only remained. And so they shall, goes one popular theory, because many believe that Earth will be the next to go. Unobserved at last, Venus and Neptune will enjoy alone together the peace and ineffable beauty of the stars.

I had included some of his poems from The Memory Theater Burned in an anthology I made of religious poems for Gail Mazur’s workshop. Religious as I define it, anyway. It was a stimulating assignment and she’s a good teacher.

The poems remind me of Borges (though everything might since I've been reading his collected fictions) and I don’t mean it’s derivative or imitative, rather they're Borgesian in style and in their confident relating of the fantastic.