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Clips of the Horizon On January 1, 2019 the New Horizons spacecraft executed a flyby of Kuiper Belt object (KBO), 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule). 1. Ultima Thule: it’s a rock. No good for skipping. Not a Sagan cross placed to get us supposing perhaps Divinity willed the blink of arriving. No, just an oblong ruddy guitar case with swells wobbling its uneventful way down the Kuiper Belt. It’s hidden strings had no chance to strum or melt out notes resonant to the music of those spheres formed in Sol’s accreted halo. It’s only a spectator, contact-binary Eremite too cold to change one crater or pebble of its 20-mile extent since early exile from Let’s Make the Worlds. Just what the scientists ordered. 2. Thule: long held the place most remote as antiquities tell it. Further, even those adrenaline junkies could not think to go. Geographers now believe they didn't all manage to achieve a common shore or people describing blue skinned Picts then wolf or seal hooded Inuits dwelling half submerged in ice smoothed meter-thick over whale bone. Urged there by who knows what well-intentioned splurge of zeal or eye for profit, those first ones from Pytheas to Saint Brendan brought back tales of perpetual ice, diminished sun spans, and a certainty that there is more beyond those lands, a Georgic Ultima north of any Thule then extant. The name became a by-word meaning “unattainable,” till recently conferred upon an improbable KBO a billion miles beyond the pole of Pluto, New Horizons’ last place visited. Attainment was harder than even Virgil could imagine: bridging distance, cold, and airless void like an archangel errant of any motive other than a glimpse of Sol’s defunct planet-making brick-kiln. The accretion models seem pleased with the binary body found glued together like my first grade papier machete sculpture. With just more questions raised, it’s good for now to have made it here. DRAFT of first two sections © 2019 David W. Parsley Parsley Poetry Collection