Poetry | July 27, 2023

To the Instrument at Arecibo II 

I was reading about all the animals  

we’ve put into space. Monkeys and dogs 

of course, but also spiders and beasts  

so small you’d need a microscope to see them.  

Spiders, in space, still figure out how 

to weave their webs, though it takes them a minute, 

and often the end result is wild  

as a storm cloud, or a nebula.  

And when a rocket crashed on the moon  

last year, it was carrying thousands of water bears,  

one of the most resilient creatures  

we’ve yet discovered. Their faces bring to mind  

a hybrid of a drill bit and a dinosaur,  

and they will more than likely outlast us.  

There’s not many things that will outlast us,  

I think. Alligators maybe, sentient driftwood  

floating through flooded coastal cities. Some music,  

hopefully, wherever collectors have hoarded  

records away in basements or museum vaults.  

I was reading an article about complacency,  

how the frequency of so-called freak weather events  

makes us numb to the worsening state  

of this world we’ve created. How even the worst storms  

can collapse, dissipate into the larger onslaught  

of the daily news. Instrument,  

the researcher on the radio said Hurricane Maria 

may have hastened your collapse. I flew  

into San Juan a year after that storm  

blew through, and the airport still wore the damage— 

ceilings torn open, windows missing, 

some terminals closed off and powerless.  

We name hurricanes and they begin to feel  

like individual offenders, like living things.