All the clouds seem to rise from the gray deadened south cap. They aren’t a bird,
but if they aren’t a bird, they are feathers,
	    the winged clouds, a frozen counter-phoenix

blizzarding. The earth
a face weather crosses like an expression,
	     glassed in a helmet with O2.


Reading that face would be a mistake,
like ascribing human motive
	  to a cat’s stare. If it says anything we can understand,
		   it says,		     food.



		   The surface is salty, like blood
		   but bitter. Mostly gristle. Small globs of fat
	linked by tendons.

			  Sometimes the troposphere looks like a frosted drink.
		  Nectar, or ambrosia, or instead

	it’s an apparition risen from the cask of winters.


The banished frost giants
are storming Valhalla for spirits,
	  spilling froth at their feet.



			     Mucilaginous and clotted,
		half-dry and rising from pyres,
		sucking on its fingers, Earth.

	It’s an ice age thawing in steam.
Then it’s a penguin, gawky on the glacier.


Out beyond low Earth orbit,
	carrying our own air, planetary
within thin cosmic shells

	pressing up against the spheres

to gather dust.
Icarian, returning from farthest
flight without our wings.


			        Kiss me Houston, with the splashdown in your teeth,
	we are caught between kinds of bird.



Waddling, tipsy,
	seeming unable to halt its own locomotion, Earth		spills
up to the lip of an ice gap,

							                  becomes slick,

bullet in the water.
			       Sinking torpedoed through the gloom.