( via / via )

Anyone with windows can be me.

"FLYBY"

2.
   4 hours in transit,
Neptune's firstseen face,
I, Swampling, ecstatic dancer,
erstwhile astronomer-in-training,
& vacillating space cadet ever,
i make the trek to gawk
a planet i once tried to story.
Ice crust then, O obsolescence of myth
while the astrologers' never varies
with the constancy
of an airtight con.
           Pyramid schemes,
pyramids.
Dream me another Neptune, screen.
Show me its fashion palette.
My greedy Swamp-eyes
becloy up with acid paint,
rusted scrap...

4.
   Neptune, planet of glamour,
green & improbable Oz-disk
not to reveal tonight
any more than before...

The ice bites deep.
I carry Plutonium....

(1989)

"About three hundred million years after the colonization of Neptune, a rabbit-like species evolves into the Tenth Men."

"The view, as we drove ourselves through the currents of this gassy sea, was monotonous, monochromatic, but weirdly beautiful." --Alexei Panshin

"...(when Robert Silverberg assembled an anthology of stories set on each planet, he had to commission Alexei Panshin to write an original one for Neptune)." ( At the Open Library.)