Berent LaBrecque
Ode to Death Cab for Cutie, Ending in Space Travel
(after Hanif Abdurraqib)

My father once told me
Though not in so many words
That he would follow me into the dark
I think
Some days
That kept me from going there in the first place
I think some days
My mother calling me her hero
Keeps me from going there still
It’s not that I am suicidal
It’s just that I can’t remember a time I couldn’t picture myself dying
Whether I wanted to or not

So of course
Whenever I question my usefulness
Feel obsolete
The humming starts again
A little buzzing in my ear
That says I have already lasted
so much longer
than I ever thought I would
So what difference would it make
I won’t live forever anyway
Who would even want that?
And no, I don’t want to live forever
But that doesn’t mean I want to die
And no, I don’t want to bury my father
But that doesn’t mean I want him to bury me

At the end of the day
we all end up in the same place.
There is a spacecraft cemetery in the Pacific Ocean
near the Point Nemo Pole of Inaccessibility
the patch of water farthest from land.
161 spaceships have left earth
gone where no one has gone before
and come back as a fireball
in the end
it didn't matter how far it went
but not all of them come back

In 1972, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe
A massive engineering project
Six hundred pounds worth of science
Going faster than any reasonable thing could go and not be called magic
Nine miles a second
Maybe less now,
Forty-five years on
The magic fraying at the edges
The science breaking down

But not entirely
Parts that were made to last
Two years stretched into ten
More
30 years after it went up
Pioneer 10 showed one last sign of life
Sent a final piece of data
Hello
I am still here

It didn’t reach NASA for months
It didn’t mean anything
Its mission is over
Has been
For longer than I have been alive
But Pioneer 10 continues
With only enough energy for a lightbulb
Still trying to pass along messages from 10 billion miles away
In enough time
We may hear more
If we listen
Closely
To the humming

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before
The universe said to the spaceship, it will be hard
The spaceship said back, I know.
Everything good tends to be.

I will never not worry about my parents
How their magic is fraying a little at the edges They start to slowly power down
But I will never not exalt my parents
How they keep sending me messages
From what feels like 10 billion miles away
So I listen close
To the humming
Even when I feel like my mission is over
And it reverberates for miles

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before
The parents say to their child, everything good tends to be hard. Keep going. You
can do this.
The child says back,
I’ll see you in a light year or two
I know it
I shall write your name in the stars
For eternity
I promise