☀ Today's Poem: "Outside the Infusion Center" Stuart Greenhouse

Here's another article
on the mysterious icy bodies
of the outer solar system;

this time Ceres, which they've found
is pitted with cryovolcanism,
pustule-like eruptions

of slow-moving ice

accumulating in place
with no weather or gravity to smooth them,
and just like each time I read

another one of these articles
on the particulars
of our outer solar system

I feel overwhelmed by not just

the strange interest I have in there being
remoter landscapes than ever
explorer on earth has flagpoled

but which still are of earth

(since earth also means
not just this, our particular planet,
but any ground under sky),

but the memory

of the first time
I found one, browsing on my phone
outside the infusion center,

waiting for my ride home,
the grass and cigarette butts
the crumpled Dunkin' cups and the weathered Dunkin'
    swizzers

the empty sugar packets the Band-Aid papers and
    butterfly

catheter packaging
clumped into homogenized little drifts
where some crabgrass had made

a miniature seine

of the neglected patchwork lawn under my feet

all that variety

nothing like the low-density slurry
of simple carbon and hypersalinated H2O
which makes up the surface of Ceres

dwarf planet so far from the sun

that the rocks of the ground are not rock are ice only
    and harder
than what we call steel and purer, colder
than what we call ice, where overhead

is not that Jersey too-much bleached-blue
home in July is
but just

the blank nothing vacuum
of deep nothing space

close as an eyelash. I had to go

to the infusion center
each day that year
because of a mysterious illness

which had come out of nowhere,
pressed close, taken my shape
fifteen years. I can still

feel my bones
aching blue
with its power, my lips tight

against the shivers
which ranged in wide circuits
under my skin

like hypoxia
was always beginning,
never finding an end.

I can still

feel myself standing there,
on the lawn by the curb

that afternoon, reading
that first article, feeling dizzy,
waiting for my ride home,

shivering fragile
as a muslin curtain
against the warm breeze,

imagining

the beauty of an icy shell covering liquid
oceans, of their tides safe
from the limitless hunger of no-air at all,

and then some kernel of warmth
down there, deep at the bottom,
a geothermal pocket maybe, some giving rift

where the frictional heat of the settling core

vents some steam,
some life-giving chemicals,
into the ocean.

I was lost, those years,
to the endless exhaustion
only illness can bring,

to an exhaustion
so constant, so much deeper
than self is

that I was only a blank,
and cold all the time, cold
as if no sun shone for me, and my face

was the face of someone I tried like a ghost to inhabit
the rooms of, for my loved ones, like a ghost trying
to hold someone close with the warmth of their trying;

and then, like turning
around, and finding
your own eyes staring

back at you
out of a mirror
you hadn't known was there,

you hadn't known
you'd walked past,
I saw myself standing

outside the infusion center
entrance's windbreak corner,
frail in the shade, but imagining

those weird purple creatures

swimming down there, slow in the cold but not too cold
for breathing of a kind, suspended and shallow
by our standards maybe, but a creeping slow metabolism

in that deep thermal pocket, deeper than sight
but also deeper than the cold nothing pressing around
    Ceres is,
above them a miles-thick shell of pure ice, inert