Life on Mars

I've always been in love with space exploration. If I had possessed the discipline for overcoming the challenges I faced in the math classroom, I would have loved to work as an engineer in the aerospace industry.

I imagine that in an alternate reality, this Marshall exists. This would be a more mathematically-disciplined Marshall, who places his time and energy into an object that left the shores of Earth. Asleep, he would often have fitful dreams about the mission/about the object. Awake, he would follow the mission closely and he would often smile considering what knowledge humanity was adding to its universities, it colleges, it schools--considering how humanity was exploring for exploration's sake.

In this reality, I held onto space exploration only as a news item or long-form article that catches my attention and demands to be read over breakfast, or at lunch. I decided years ago to put my intellectual energies--small as they are--into writing. I found that I got a fair amount of pleasure in struggling to find the write words to express myself accurately. I learned to whittle long and ugly expressions, into ones short and elegant. I studied poetry. I studied how to teach writing. I used these skills to make a living. What it would have been like to work for NASA or JPL? I don't know, but I think about it.

I think about it mostly when I talk to my brother. My brother works in a lab that studies the ways in which light affects the endocrine system. The lab gets some funding, sometimes, from those organizations I mentioned. My brother even constructed a moonlight machine. It simulates, roughly he would say, the wavelength of light on the moon's surface--as though you stood there. He's not in space no, but I envy him. A moonlight machine.

All of this is to explain how excited I was to hear poet Tracy K. Smith read from her latest book, Life on Mars, last Friday on the PBS Newshour. Poetry. Space. I think I squealed. I love Smith's work for reasons that I won't go into here, and I know that's not much of a pitch, but I encourage you to buy and read her books. Jeffrey Brown interviewed her for a great segment. Here's video of the segment, and this link is web-only content of Smith reading her poems and talking about her work. As the shuttle program closes over the next few days, please re-consider the line between good art and good science. They share at least two qualities: discipline and exploration.