But poetry is among the oldest human arts; it is found in every society. Little children love the wacky jingle-jangle of poetry; in concentration camps, when brutal guards aren’t watching, gaunt survivors eke out lines of poetry; new lovers can barely keep themselves from writing poems, maybe for the first time in their lives; when someone dies, a mourner may be tempted to write a poem celebrating the beloved’s life. All these poetry fans must not have gotten the memo from the spreadsheet crew about the fatal limitations of the arts. Under florescent lights in air-conditioned offices, their spreadsheets turn gray and brittle, and dust gathers on their binders, while outside, poetry spits on the asphalt, turns up its collar and walks into the wind, chanting the names of the living and the lost. Given a chance, most people vote at one time or another in their lives for poetry.

And not because of the checkbook or the ledger or the breaking news, for those are not the only stories we want to hear about our lives. In a love poem he wrote late in life, William Carlos Williams addressed his wife directly with these words: “We have stood from year to year before the spectacle of our lives with joined hands. The storm unfolds. Lightning plays about the edges of the clouds.” Williams was correct: one thing we need to better know is the storm and spectacle of our lives. Because we live in the solitude of our own hearts, we need the spiritual nourishment of poetry. In that same poem, Williams wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

For in poetry we nudge ourselves awake. A couple of weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night. There were voices outside. I pushed up one slat of the window blind and looked out. Several cars were parked around the neighbor’s house. I put on my robe and walked through the dark rooms of the house toward a south window. The last snow of the season was falling past the porch light in the shape of soap flakes; it seemed as though the smallest of diamonds had been seeded haphazardly across the blanket of new snow. 

The adult children of our neighbor were saying goodnight, slowly, taking their time deep in the night, then starting cars one by one and heading off. For weeks they had been coming one or two at a time to the house, morning or afternoon or evening, sitting in hospice with their beautiful, strong mother as she endured the last stages of cancer. But this time they had all come at once and all stayed long into the night. Then they were gone, and one by one the windows of the house went dark. Outside, bare trees held up fresh snow in all their branches.

It was time, I knew, to write a card to the family; time to say a prayer; to think of friends; to listen with gratitude to the peaceful breathing of my wife there in the bed. It was time to try to sleep, or as good as any of these, it was time to write a poem.

To get started, we offered our parents flimsy reasons for visiting the nearby shopping center. Our teacher Sister James Louise had taught us that by carefully leaving out key facts we could commit what was called a sin of omission. So we didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, we’re going to buy the parts to assemble a realistic fake UFO that will thrust Samoa Drive into the headlines.” Instead, we did what we had to do. We lied. Walking to the shopping center, Jack and I strategized about lightweight batteries and silver paint. We brainstormed about constructing a working saucer out of things sold for next to nothing at Woolworth’s. We counted our coins and our few wrinkled dollar bills. This thing just might work.

Up and down the aisles we walked, shopping for the hull of a UFO. At long last we spotted the clear plastic dome of a make-up kit. We bought two, one for the top of the UFO and one for the bottom. Outside the store, when the coast was clear, we threw away the make-up and tucked the two domes into our pockets. Back in the store again, we got up the nerve to order the largest, most babyish helium balloon they would make for us. At the cash register, afraid for our masculine reputations, we also asked the clerk for a bag. Carrying the huge, round, weightless bag through the shopping center seemed hilarious at the time.

After school each day, our work continued in earnest—painting the hull silver except for its windows, attaching batteries to light bulb, and designing a way for the balloon to carry our flying saucer on fishing line and level far below. We tried to figure out how to get someone to spot its glowing windows in the darkness, without seeing the balloon soaring above it. We knew that we should not make the first report, and anyway, we had to be ready to reel in our mischievous device at a moment’s notice. Solutions eluded us, and everything was made more difficult by our having to go to school.

That time is a blur to me now, but perhaps it was the third day when we rushed back from school to find the balloon on the floor, nodding quietly. Our UFO dreams were deflating. How many great adventures have been stillborn because young dreamers are stuck in school until the afternoon? Jack and I turned to other pastimes; we played board games and went out to look at stars. One night, sitting on his lawn, we saw two lights in strict formation zipping faster than any jet across the fabric of the stars. We could not explain what we had seen—do meteors travel in formation? In our minds, anyway, those two FOs remained deeply and ominously U. As I walked home that night past the dark shapes of neighborhood bushes and echo-y black stretches of lawn and lurking shadows, I worked myself up into quite a fright.

When I was a kid astronauts sported on the moon—something I had only dreamed about but always felt would come true, but in my lifetime? Wow! That first reverent transmission to us from Tranquility Base took about one and a half seconds to reach earth. By contrast, the Voyager spacecrafts, one and two, are about 11 billion miles away, and those signals take more than 16 hours to get to us, but still coming, after 35 years. That’s pretty far out . . . man. I hope the interstellar travelers who find the craft take a moment to play the record that’s on board before they come crashing in to wipe us out with their ultra ray guns, nanobots or whatever. They’re going to hear some beautiful music by Bach that might convince them that at least some of us are not hideous selfish beasts. In The Day the Earth Stood Still it was the music of Bach that convinced the formidable Klaatu that there was hope for humanity: “Klaatu barada nikto.” Which I take to mean: “Gort, turn off the cosmic vacuum cleaner and give these folks a chance.”

SETI, an earthbound space mission, collects data from big telescopes and listening devices, and computers all over the world, harnessed together, form the world’s largest super-computer, to sift through all these results for signals with intelligent origins. These signals will have taken years—centuries maybe—to reach us. Epsilon Eridani, the tenth-closest star to earth, is the nearest one with a planet—it might have two—and only ten and a half light years away. Another hot prospect is 150 light years away. So far, Hubble spectroscopes show it has sodium gas in its atmosphere. So maybe not people, but if we get that far out we’ll at least have salt for our pork chops, right? The Wow! Factor is growing stronger.

Now these three missions are the ones I’m pinning my hopes on, for the only thing that matters: Life, of course. Mars is the closest—35 million miles (the odometer on my ancient Honda is almost that high)—and the best place I’m betting we’re going to find living things, or evidence of it in the planet’s past.

With that knowledge, science will finally have a fighting chance to triumph over ignorance. We people will see we may not be the lords of the universe and ought to take better care of what we would then be sharing with an immensity of other life forms. We’re not the sole focus of whatever gods we might happen to believe in, and we have to get our act together and go out to meet the new neighbors.

When I check out the new photographs each day, of course Mars looks rough and rocky, but like most space fans I long for more. How does the wind-howl sound on Mars? Would live audio from the Curiosity rover reveal nightbirds crying across those seas of cold dust and stone? Those far fliers might not look like the ones we know back here at home, but their songs are calling us.