Jupiter

We just watched mighty Jupiter, globe vast and dusky spinning fleet every ten hours a revolution, it crawled up the edge of a mighty scaffolding, like some Ptolemeic fluke the firmament was committed to measurement and mighty Jupiter raced like a pony. Or was it us that was moving, as you kept saying just as Jove spins earth spins likewise, but slower, and so much less to spin you could cram hundreds of our world in its cloud deck like bowling balls bouncing around the tilt a whirl at an amusement park all these rocky orbs in coplanar orbits not inevitable just luck because our star condensed the right way to produce a pleasant series of ellipse.

Jupiter, you could have eaten us, long ago, when the solar system was a few hundred million years old and accretional friction from all those tiny chunks of rock and planet you swallowed added up to braking and tighter orbits and thank god you ran out of things to eat on the way. It stopped you. And here we both are. Thank you Jupiter for all the deadly asteroids you have swallowed up over the years, bolides that could have smashed into the earth. I am sorry i never made it to the planetarium when you were eating Shoemacher Levy, it was a show, but I was going through an ugly breakup at the time. Still, getting out of the house would have done me good and there is nothing like astronomy to make a person wonder about things. Like bikinis. I am brutish and savage, a product of mammalian evolution and scratch me, yes, do it, you will feel the ape beneath the flesh, evolved from nucleic acid and opportunistic ontogeny, selfish dna and unselfish, slaughter and nurture, till neuron meet neuron and there we are, both on the balcony watching the sunset marveling at the tons of steel, iron forged in the heart of a red giant and carbon most likely cycled through a million cycads and jawless fish on the way to its status as a railing, protecting the both of us from some final oblivion. It is a shame that we only get to know so much.