The following are excerpts from Life on Mars and Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith.

My God, It’s Full of Stars

by Tracy K. Smith

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Related Segment Metaphors, Medicine, And The Poetry Of Science

Watershed

by Tracy K. Smith

200 cows more than 600 hilly acres

property would have been even larger

had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for

waste from its Washington Works factory

where J was employed

did not want to sell

but needed money poor health

mysterious ailments

Not long after the sale cattle began to act

deranged

footage shot on a camcorder

grainy intercut with static

Images jump repeat sound accelerates

slows down

quality of a horror movie

the rippling shallow water the white ash

trees shedding their leaves

a large pipe

discharging green water

a skinny red cow

hair missing back humped

a dead black calf in snow its eye

a brilliant chemical blue

a calf’s bisected head

liver heart stomachs kidneys

gall bladder some dark some green

cows with stringy tails malformed hooves

lesions red receded eyes suffering slobbering

staggering like drunks

It don’t look like

anything I’ve been into before

Excerpt from “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from Life on Mars. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Excerpt from “Watershed” from Wade in the Water. Copyright © 2019 by Tracy K. Smith. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.