Poem for Cassini
now, after flirting for years with her and her little sisters, running the elliptic around her shimmering bejeweled edges, he is skipping along her outer frozen breath, caressing the kinky old birdās delicate methane skin, dipping and teasing while her sisters watch and all sing,Ā
Saturn and Cassini, sitting in a tree, e-x p-l-o-r i-n-g
he cannot approach her sisters for fear of what he might spread, three score and more virgin worlds, flirt yes, you can look but you canāt touch.Ā
he cannot go home, she is his home now, so vast, only knowable through the most delicate of gliding encounters. after a twenty year dance around this little pocket of the infinite,Ā she is his only purpose.
and now, he is diving, committed, going all the way,Ā vulnerable and unprotected, down into her breathless unknown, winking once at Enceladus, her secretly squirting little sister of tortured surface, before disappearing from the skies, from our wondering eyes, enveloped and one-way, all the way, burning and uniting, together at last in the deepest dark.
so long, little bird. hope it was as good for you as it was for us
