New Mars

Written by Richard Poss. Part of the Mars Tales issue.

Selections

In school we learned about the sonnet sequence (from Petrarch to Ronsard and Sidney) which does not tell a love story, but offers lyric meditations on aspects of love within a series of implied narratives. In this series of poems, instead of love for the Lady, the theme is isolation in a hostile universe. An astronaut crash-lands and is stranded on a distant planet. As he waits to die from thirst, fatigue, delirium, etc., his lyric evocations come without hope.

It seems late to be contributing to the tradition of fantastic Martian settings, rather than to the scientifically accurate ones. But Mars is metaphor for a place far beyond the fourth planet. No farther from the “truth” than were those of Burroughs, Bradbury, or Lowell, it is an interior space, a soul’s landscape, but it is also Mars. All these settings speak of our ancient kinship with the red planet, where humanity’s next chapter will be written. The dialectic between the emptiness of isolation and the richness of solitude really should take place somewhere beyond the Virgo cluster, but Mars will do for now.

1

I stand alone on the vast plain.

A book tumbles through the sky

And falls to the desert floor.

It is the story of a man, a normal

And therefore most terrible man-

He stands alone on a vast plain.

4

I stood alone under a full moon.

It divided into two half-moons

And they argued over whether

To stone me to death with meteors.

9

I lie down on the plain to rest.

Since nothing ever changes,

I see no reason to move.

Soon my legs become part of the ground,

My torso becomes an outcropping,

One day I realize all the rock formations

Once were men like me.

11

He looked out over the desert planet.

Canyons ran over the baked surface,

Cracks miles across,

Cracks the size of a hair.

On Earth they would be having Spring now.

13

In the middle of the desert was a fountain.

Dying of thirst, crawling to the edge,

I could see my face in the water.

Every time I reached down

The water sank further away.

17

Wandering through the vast plain

I came to a city under a transparent dome.

There was an airlock, I entered,

And festive crowds in celebration

Swept around me:

We have found the ground of being,

We have found the answer.

For days I wandered through the city,

They were so joyful,

No one spoke to me, so I never answered,

Finally I trudged out into the desert.

When I turned to look back, the city was gone.

19

As I walk I notice ridges in the sand

Occurring at chaotic intervals.

Eventually I decipher the code.

It is a love poem by the creator

For the creatures of this world,

A long and profound apology.

22

I said to the Universe,

“You may be large in size,

But we created a hundred

Mathematical systems

And a thousand languages.

What do you think of that?”

The Universe cleared its throat,

And Mars vaporized like a droplet from a sneeze.

23

Alone on the vast plain,

He lifts one arm, then the other,

And moves about in a slow dance.

Helmet, tank, and gloves throw sculptural lines

Against the stream of stars.

He thinks of Heraclitus: “All is change,”

Looking foolish in his tubby suit,

He spins and leaps and reaches into

The dense flow of the galaxy.

There must be a structure beyond all structures.

30

Walking across the Martian landscape,

I notice the larger canyons

Have the same shape as the smaller ones,

And the smaller ones have ditches

And the ditches have cracks

With similar structures within.

With my hand I can trace ejecta patterns,

Castles of regolith blown amongst the rocks,

Trails of clouds banked against the horizon,

And self-similar ridges in the palm of my hand.

So every atom and every star

Dances in pattern with every footfall.

I am enmeshed in a woven Universe

Of interlocking structures,

But I am still lost.

32

Kneeling down, I lifted a rock

To uncover a pancake-shaped creature

Who said, “This is exciting,

But I find you difficult to reconcile

With my previously engineered paradigms.”

“We all proceed by violent revolution,”

I replied, “Stripping away the past

To accommodate the new light of reality.”

Just then the sky behind me lifted away…

55

Alone for some years now

He kneels and gazes out

Past cliffs and crater points

To the rising mist of stars.

He likes the way his muscles feel,

Moving his body in tune

With an ancient formulation.

He thinks of Boethius and Goddard,

Tsiolkovsky and Clarke,

And tells himself that over his shoulders

Breathe down a thousand ancestors

Who longed, and failed,

And in their failing, in their aloneness,

Is his company.

62

I met a bright parade crossing the desert at night.

“We are the explorers who never made it back.

We went out to the edge of the world and froze,

Starved, drowned, or boiled away

In the vacuum of space.”

“We knew there would be accidents,

Murder, malaria, cockpit fires,

Exploding fuel tanks,

Mistakes of navigation or of character,

But we kept going.”

Now I could see individual men and women

Striding easily together.

They wore death lightly, I wanted to join them,

But they waved me off and kept marching.

64

Wandering over the vast plain,

I took comfort in the verifiable

Truths of science.

A rip in space-time

Appeared above the desert floor,

And a hand emerged holding a golden cup,

A fountain flowed down from it

Soaking the ground,

The green leaves of grape vines

Rose up and enfolded me,

And I became a docile fibre

Of the living cosmos.

But where is the verification?

“Scratch a scientist, find a reductionist.”

66

Sprawled on the desert floor

He again obeyed the insane command

To keep going.

How could this be progress,

To follow dots on a visor screen,

When all around him the desert sand

Sighed despair.

Sifting his fingers through the sand,

The horizon a straight line in every direction,

His hand caught on a curved edge.

He lifted from the desert a sculpted head,

So this was the race that built Mars.

From this artifact he could deduce

Community, grace, pride,

From the symbols on its forehead,

Culture, religion.

He held it, felt its blank gaze,

Kissed its inhuman features.

“Am I too late?” he asked the fragment,

“Let me tell you what we did…”

68

For years I wandered

The Martian landscape.

The infinite varieties

Of silence

Kept me company.

Filed under: Articles on August 7th, 2001