Ceres

Deep ambiguity of life's possibility

Thru briny rock and saltfroze water fountain,

Bleeding an expansive ooze once every five thousand millenia

Beneath the gray cruelties of vacuum sky

While tiny meteorites slash by

Some to leave circlecurve ridgeless

Aside the briefplumed bluish exploding dust.

Itself neither planet nor comet nor really asteroid categorized

But rather the cold dead acme of grayness itself

Until another fifty million years should yield by geyser sked

Another breachy leak of dead sea liquid quick to dissipate

And leave behind pillar lattice white, bitumenlike as a Lot's wife,

Of idiosyncratic shape like the Ennedi rock monuments of Chad

But these confined by appearance upon roughsmoothed gray musketball

Ceres, like molten lead spheres' rapid descent down holes of sandstone shotcaves at river's edge,

All made of carbonate clay hydrated, its internal ocean blanding all but froze

Til lava cures its hapless incontinent fatesome woes;

Yet still by then perhaps another probe

aptnamed Dawn might approach A latest

round of tenuous, scant vapor exospheric,