This outpost
is a sorry place,
but I’m a scientist
who must take pleasure
in the most arid soil,
the barest rock,
of a planet
that surely deserves
to be unknown.

Far from the breath
of a loved one,
this world kills
in a way
so no harm
seems to be done.
I’m roused
from dreams of home,
to reconvene with what
I’m being paid to do:
the travel,
the digging,
the assaying,
the reporting.

It’s a vast galaxy.
It’s beautiful
where I choose it to be,
ugly everywhere else.

John writes Your Man on Xenon V, and I am drawn to it not just because it tells us a tale of distance and loss, but because it reflects the human relationship with space. We make meaning and thus we make space—there is just that to beauty, little else.