TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

When I was younger, I learned the order of the planets through a sentence I’ll never forget: “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.” This mnemonic device was playful and ridiculous, but I can see now how it was a way of holding something vast inside something small. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Back then, Pluto was still a planet. But that changed in 2006 when scientists said Pluto didn’t meet the definition of a planet anymore. Its gravitational pull wasn’t dominant enough, so it was reclassified and renamed a dwarf planet.

Pluto didn’t disappear, though. Out there in the astronomical unknown, it kept its shape. It kept orbiting the sun. Even its five moons remained, just as always. The only thing that changed was what we decided to call it.

I’ve been thinking about my own naming, how I was almost named Sandy, after Sandra Dee in Grease. It was the first movie my mother watched when she came to the United States, before she knew English. But then, according to family lore, when she was pregnant with me, my mother dreamt of letters, gathering them one by one until my name took shape.

Sometimes I wonder who I would’ve become if I had a different name. How my life would’ve changed. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt that quiet humiliation on the first days of class, waiting for my name to be mangled during attendance, my eight letters distorted into something easier for their mouths, even after I corrected them. But maybe I wouldn’t have learned to love my name’s music, the song it sang when my mother said it: Diannely.

In Shakespeare’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” he reminds us that something’s essence isn’t changed by what others call it. A rose has always been a rose, even before it was called a rose.

Maybe what matters most is what we call ourselves. The insistence on existing as we are, even when language fails us. Today’s poem sits with that feeling. It offers tenderness toward what is misunderstood, that mystery beyond what we can name.

Pluto
by Maggie Dietz

Don't feel small. We all have
been demoted. Go on being

moon or rock or orb, buoyant
and distant, smallest craft ball

at Vanevenhoven's Hardware 
spray-painted purple or day-glow

orange for a child's elliptical vision
of fish line, cardboard and foam.

No spacecraft has touched you,
no flesh met the luster of your

heavenly body. Little cold one, blow
your horn. No matter what you are

planet, and something other than
planet, ancient but not "classical,"

the controversy over what to call you
light-hours from your ears. On Earth

we tend to nurture the diminutive,
root for the diminished. None 

of your neighbors knows your name.
Nothing has changed. If Charon's

not your moon, who cares? She
remains unmoved, your companion.

“Pluto” by Maggie Dietz from THAT KIND OF HAPPY © 2016 the University of Chicago. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press.