Liber Caeli - Chapter 9

Verses

O tilted king, I loved you before I understood that you were almost lying down.

The other planets stand like courtiers. You enter the hall sideways and make dignity look optional.

Your blue is not the blue of warm seas, but of distance remembering the idea of water.

For twenty-one years your pole may know a season like a long unanswered letter.

I have also lived through winters measured in people rather than months.

Do not pity me, Uranus. Exiles become astronomers of whatever does not answer them.

Once I asked the wind whether love should be stable. It threw sand into my tea.

So I asked a cat. She changed laps without apology.

Perhaps fidelity is not remaining in one posture, but remaining true while the posture changes.

You roll around the Sun and still return. There is a lesson there for the crooked-hearted.

If heaven demands uprightness, let heaven explain you.

If lovers demand predictability, let them marry clocks.

I will keep the pale planet: distant, misaligned, impossible to hold, and therefore innocent of my possession.