i. I could make that tired old comparison about how the city lights look like stars but I won't.
ii. I see a bug, lost in a lamppost's light, and suddenly it's the most important thing and I have to sit down with the staggering weight of it.
iii. I sit on a slab of concrete, backpack at my feet, wind pushing against the planes of my face, feeling like a schoolboy who's too afraid to go home, or maybe he lost his home long ago.
iv. The warm air rises to the top of the stair well.
v. In the morning, the clouds have draped themselves over the mountains in an ombre of gray, like vision leaving eyes for greener pastures and crows fly across the clouds in the way crows so often do.
vi. the first of the forsythia flowers have fallen. They sit like bright moths on the asphalt or scattered stars against a sky of soil or fallen stars sinking slowly into the earth.
vii. we shiver in the chill of an early spring rain, and I weave my way through a crowded crosswalk.
viii. tell me a story of the men who searched for the gods in a landscape of wind and died in desolate places their hands still reaching, reaching.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
Yes, it's pretty bad when it spews chunks close to your face and you feel the heat of the stink rise to your skin acid enough to melt metal... but when it sits like a gourd in your stomach or a billiard ball the size of a basketball when it settles over your mind like a dusty cobweb when your eyes look and look and see nothing... I don't think there's a word for it. I just want to sleep. Let the dust cover my body. It will keep me warm when winter comes.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
Phoebe - Bright One The first ring of Saturn is a fogged up window that extends forever. When we light it up red, it's a shock-wave, a crater, larger than the sun, 7000 times bigger than Saturn itself-- or more, because who can say where these things end? Earth might be floating in Phoebe. If she weren't so dim, she'd be two full moons in our sky.
Phoebe the ring is named after Phoebe the moon is named after Phoebe the moon goddess who is the very personification of the moon in ancient myth and modern poetry.
Scientists call Phoebe (the moon) a lot of names. Centaur, captured, dark, distant, irregular, retrograde, trapped. She was a visitor from an outer system who got lured in by glowing rings. Phoebe (the ring) must have cloaked her, sheltered her in a fog, a sleepy dust slowing her travels, every speck a whispered sweet nothing.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
E - Echo and Mathematical Constant The second ring of Saturn is made of icedust spewed from tigerstripes of Enceladus (a moon that was named for a hundred-armed Giant now buried beneath Sicily. How he was pulled into orbit around a real gas giant, I do not know) E cradles Trojan moons that have moons of their own: Telesto, Calypso, Helene and Polydeuces, Greek myths whose names mean Success, Conceal, Torch, and Sweet. E holds these moons close, covering them with caring kisses, coating their craters with bright ice that sparkles and smooths.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
Alkyonide Arcs - Pallene, Anthe, Methone Alkyonides: Wintry, clear blue skies in Greece, or the seven daughters of a giant. I like to imagine them, in white dresses, the youngest sucking her thumb, holding hands before they throw themselves into the sea. Grief over their father's death. Poseidon's wife, in pity, seeing the drowning girls, white dresses looking so much like wings, transfigured them into beautiful white birds-- halcyons, a type of kingfisher, whose name also means "happy times gone by." They are thought to nest on the ocean itself during the calm time of Alkyonides (the weather). Then, the Alkyonides (the daughters) must have broken free of the ocean in a spray of foam.
From these facts, I can only imagine Pallene, Anthe, Methone and their four sisters loved their father more than life itself, but found peace in feathers and waves.
The rings themselves are faint. Mere hairline breaths circling 'round and 'round. Perhaps those three halcyons broke free of the atmosphere and circle Saturn, imagining their father is right around the bend.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
you make me fall more in love with space than I already do, admiring with wide-eyed wonder these stories you spin. also, your language? it's beautiful, these hairline breaths that give your words a starry alcove in the sky; your writing is so light and it's breath-taking.
G - Gravity and Enstien Tensor (see: curvature of spacetime) The fourth (or is it sixth?) ring of Saturn is a cough of Aegean ice, with a blink of bright, and is mostly forgotten.
Janus/Epimetheus - transition/hindsight The fifth ring of Saturn is another story of moons (rings are just moon debris after all) Janus and Epimetheus are so inseparable they were thought to be a single moon. They sail so close, one's orbit is only 30 seconds ahead of the other's. Janus is the god of doors, archways, January, transition, and is two-faced; while Epimetheus can only look back. How tragic that Epimetheus's bother, Prometheus (foresight), dwells a ring away.
Epimetheus cannot look ahead at his brother, just as Prometheus cannot see Epimetheus behind him, sometimes as a silhouette against the burning of a distant sun.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
I love the whole concept of space that you're taking on at the moment and it kind of reminds me of the one time we all got 'Sevens Ways to Reach the Moon' in the spotlight but in a way it's different and I like that. I hope you keep working on this series because dang, girl, it's good, especially the newest one that included the mythology and I'm learning so much!
F - failing grade, female, part of the ionosphere, and the Dominical letter for a common year starting on Tuesday F (the 6th ring of Saturn) is a feisty one. It changes its looks hourly. But this is another story of moons.
Prometheus (who we all now know as Forethought) also brought fire to man, and the Gods punished him and all mankind. Part of this punishment was the creation of the first woman. Her name was Pandora and the gods loaded all the gifts of seduction they could onto her. Her very name means "the all-endowed," and she and her descendants would torment men for the rest of time, as a "beautiful evil." But it wasn't just her mere existence that plagued mankind. For the gods had given the All-Gifted a gift. A box. You may have heard of it. Prometheus warned his brother Epimethius not to accept gifts from the gods but Epimethius accepted Pandora. How could he not? She was everything beautiful. She fell into his arms and opened her box behind his back. Plagues and pestilence, toils and tribulations were unleashed into the world. Only hope remained within the box (the poet never told us why).
Now Pandora and Prometheus ever circle around Saturn, encased together in F, the ring that formed when they collided. Perhaps their constant bickering is why F's shape changes so often.
Spoiler! :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIA07712_-_F_ring_animation.ogv a video of Pandora (left) and Prometheus (Right). Prometheus acts as F's Shepherd.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
The Roche Division - topographic name for someone who lived by a rocky outcrop or crag This is not a ring. This is a place where there should be a ring but, inexplicably, there is not. In a way it's a ring of emptiness. Named after a man who loved Saturn's rings, it's funny to give his name to something exactly its opposite.
Instead, he said, Brother! I know your hunger. To this, the Wolf answered, Lo!
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