They live wondering If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know, And the great black distance they - we - flicker in. Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone - a momentary blip - When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere, Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones At whatever are their moons. In “The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,” she realizes - or maybe just hopes - “Everything that disappears / Disappears as if returning somewhere.” On the first day the Hubble’s “optics jibed,” she writes, “We saw to the edge of all there is - / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” It’s hard not to hear an echo of Nietzsche in those lines - “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee” - but for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion: Smith’s father was a scientist who worked on the Hubble’s development, and in her elegies mourning his death, outer space serves both as a metaphor for the unknowable zone into which her father has vanished and as a way of expressing the hope that his existence hasn’t ceased, merely changed. You can’t simultaneously contemplate the vastness of the universe and take such problems seriously.Īt the outset of her third poetry collection, Smith too turns her eyes to the stars in search of perspective and solace, but for her the stakes are considerably higher and the images closer to home. I look at it when I find myself fretting about, say, book review deadlines or my spotty gym attendance. I’ve long used the image as an efficient and emphatic corrective for solipsism. Scientists say it’s an incubator for baby stars. Turner would have admired, of the Cone Nebula, a pillar of dust and gas some 2,500 light-years from Earth. It’s a dramatic and vivid picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, with colors I imagine J. Smith’s “Life on Mars” is the same one I see every day on my computer desktop.

I won’t blame you for not believing this: The photograph on the cover of Tracy K.

Tracy k smith poems life on mars