Associate Editor Lily Davenport: Steven Pan’s “Perigee” traces the movements of slow ecological collapse with grace and remove: a perspective that is all the more deeply felt for its apparent distance. The language of fossils and of space exploration turns at once funny and elegiac in this speaker’s vision, as everything from algae to dire wolves attempts to answer the poem’s central question: “How to be alive?“
Perigee
Today the Perseverance picks up evidence of water
on Mars. Scaled to Earth’s geography, a body
large enough to be called an ocean. Off the coast
of Southern California, the ocean licks a beach
-front property into its mouth. To keep score,
hunger adds to itself, asymptotic to a whole. In halves
and in eighths, the Moon over the water divides
another month. I learn Volvox is a type of algae
that times its life cycle to moonlight. I learn
just to forget what it is I once longed so much
to know. How to be alive? I used to remember
if it was a horsetail or the pickerelweed sprouting
from oxidized iron, opening to the sound
of prehistoric waves. How you could look
at any ocean and believe you wouldn’t fit
inside. How that meant we were happy. If the mailbox
left behind on the berm still had its flag
turned up, waiting for tomorrow regardless.
Despite knowing that tomorrow, it will only be today
again. Just a circle the circle
never looped back into. A circumference expanding
of things no longer here: Californian dire wolves,
a particular species of flower that bloomed
in the Arctic, you, the empty house
that tried to cross the Pacific. A seagull that landed
on the blue rail, the paint salted into fishy
scales by the waves, how it almost looked like forgiveness.
And the rover wandering Earth one day
could spend a lifetime to make sense of the phalange bones
on the porch railing. Until every permutation of 0 and 1
runs out. Its system resetting in front of the red lever glimmering
in the sand. Picked up and mistaken for some long-ago treasure.
Steven Pan currently resides in New York. His poetry has most recently been featured in Rattle, The Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Northwest, and The National Poetry Review. He is a former Fulbright Research Scholar.
Read More miCRos
