Contributor’s Marginalia: Anne-Marie Thompson responding to John A. Nieves’ “Telescoping”

Between August and December, 2020, cables supporting the gigantic Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, first built to spot Russian missiles and later to study things like black holes and radio waves in the ionosphere, began breaking, resulting in the telescope’s collapse. The failure was an incredible blow, not only to the scientific community, but to the entire island of Puerto Rico; the Arecibo telescope generated jobs, tourism, and status. John Nieves’s poem, “Telescoping,” explores the collapse’s effect on an individual, but the deeply personal implications reverberate outward, into the veritable reaches of the cosmos.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker’s present-tense misspeak, “Mi tio trabaja / en Arecibo,” is a result of both habit and hope. We aren’t completely sure whether the speaker is accidentally or willfully wrong, and the poem’s ambiguity heightens its poignance. When the speaker tells people at the basketball court that his uncle works, present-tense, on the telescope, “they all understood.” Understanding: It connotes interpretation, a deep and full knowledge, a movement from before to after. The ball players make the leap, both to the correct word, trabajaba, and to the speaker’s position of wishful thinking. And the highly enjambed lines enact this movement, “Hope” teetering conspicuously at the edge of the line, not once but twice.

The movement from trabaja to trabajaba indicates an expansion, the word itself stretching out like a child’s telescope. As reality comes into focus, the speaker’s understanding expands. But with true understanding, there is also contraction and collapse. The speaker’s new perception makes his “childhood / stars [blink] out into past tense.” The stars are inaccessible now to the dish, its “metal leaning out / of meaning.” This is a tragic, but lovely, example of telescoping language: metal leaning condenses into meaning, the language again enacting its subject: the real telescope and its collapse; the expansion of the speaker’s consciousness as the universe folds in around him.

Through the speaker’s progression toward acceptance, we see the larger ramifications of the ruined telescope. The island is “newly blind,” attempting to find itself again without Arecibo and the literal and metaphorical light it brought. This knowledge is existential: “And the ocean knew its sharks.” To see, suddenly, our own frightening truths, hiding in plain sight. Rather than looking outward, toward the miraculous scientific unknown, we must confront the real dangers and failures right in front of us. The price of true understanding is high: to become irreparably aware of the terrors of simply existing.