Voodoo Hypothesis

Before sight, we imagine
that while they go out in search
of God
we stay in and become god,
become: Curiosity,
whose soul is a nuclear battery
because she’ll pulverize Martian rock
and test for organic molecules
in her lab within a lab within
a lab. She doesn’t need to know our fears
so far too grand for ontology, reckoning.

Did you not land with your rocket behind
you, hope beyond hope on the tip of your rope
with the kindness of antigravity slowing you down,
you, before me, metal and earthen. But I am here to
confirm or deny, the millions of small
things that seven minutes of success were hinged upon
when I was little more than idea and research,
in the hypnotic gestures of flame and Bunsen burner,
and into parachute
no one foresaw, the bag of rags at the end
of the tunnel – all memory now,
this Paraclete.

Where else is a pocket
of air more deadly than the atomic bomb?
Would this only happen on Earth?
Has Mars run out of tolerance for the minutiae

of air pockets, fingerprints and worry?
Aggregates of metal, Curiosity
and her clues to calm our fears for what’s coming.
Mars and her epic storms, her gargantuan
volcanoes have long ceased their trembling,
her crazy flooded planes, frozen and in cinema.
Martian life now earth and revelation’s phases:
Earth problem, not Mars problem.

But why
should I unravel over all this remembering?
Great thing about landing
is that I’ve arrived

at your service, at your sand, at your valley
and unsentimental magma.
Before me screams planes like Mojave Desert, Waikiki, Nagasaki,
nothing too strange to keep Curiosity off course.
Even though the Viking missions found no conclusive pulse
and we declared you dead, O Mars,
never mind that we named your heights and depths
from orbit. And from your spheres of minerals
where oceans once roared – we’ve learned little
of your lenience for empire.
Forgive us what Spirit uncovered in the silica of your ancient hot springs.

Ah, yes, we’ve come back home.
Phoenix told us we inherited the numberless
stories of your hydraulic pathologies
but I am Curiosity. If I kill the bitch right,
she’ll take us deeper and convince us to send earthlings
to set up Earth colonies on your deserts. They won’t ever
come back, but that’s not so bad when we trade in
the grander scheme.
As though the colonials, the Tribe Traders
and all the pharaonic masquerades of gone times
were not fair threat. That we won’t know the depth
of our homeward seas
is nothing when

the sun’s still got our backs.
And while waters still vaporize before us
Curiosity will keep on until the organic secrets
of that Martian puzzle become as household to us
as carbon. Oxygen wasn’t the only disaster to befall Earth,
to bless her with life.

Apollo drilled on the moon and got stuck
and the harder we’ve drilled down here
the more we’ve loosened our screws.
Perhaps there’ll be no one left to give
a damn about the death of our privates

unless we prove ourselves enigmas,
the alien we think we know is the alien we only dream
up starting from the bottom
of the Curious.

We wake and die through
the crowns and thorns and craned chapters,
we move too quick for understanding.
Still, through the decades we predict,
Curiosity confirms
the cold-slain dust.

Then come her conches blown
in the hard-won postcards travelling
on space dust faster than a bullet
to say:

hey,
I’m here. I safe. Wish you were here.
See Gale Crater, Mount Sharp, just as you’ve said.
Come bask with me in the wonders of a Martian. Good afternoon,
you of flowering faith. Set sail for home,
because we will all wear the consequences of this choice.
And you never should have said
goodbye.