The Martians(141)
Films feathering on its surface
Incandescent in the night
Illuminating the glacial polish
Of the slab reflecting in that black
Mirror the night quiet the air still
Slightly smoky the stars again
Fixed in their places the meteor
Shower past its peak the stream
Chuckling as it had all along
Oblivious to the life in the sky
A companion of sorts as I watched
The burning visitation warm
My hands as it filmed over
Darkening in its orange
Brilliance until it was both orange
And black I went to get my sleeping
Bag to drape me in my vigil
Sleep gone again so many nights
Like that but this time justified by
My visitor cooling aglow black flakes
Crusting over growing
Orange darker underneath
The moon rose over the jagged peaks
Bathed the basin in its cool light
Flecked the water in the stream
Dark air holding invisible light
The meteorite now black over orange
Still warm still the center
Of all that basin dark on its slab
Of polished pale granite
In the dawn the rock was purest black
Of course I took it home with me
And put it on mantelpiece as a
Memento of that night and a mark
Of where we stand in the world but
I will always remember how it felt
The night it shot down out of the sky
And it glowed orange as I sat beside it
And it warmed me like a little sun
Purple Mars
He crawls out of troubled dreams half-stunned and begging for coffee. Out to the family around the kitchen table. Breakfast a succession of Cassatts as painted by Bonnard, or Hogarth.
“Hey I'm going to finish my book today.”
“Good.”
“David, hurry up and get dressed, it's almost time for school.”
David looks up from a book. “What?”
“Get dressed it's almost time. Tim, do you want cereal?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He puts Tim back on a chair in front of cereal. “This okay?”
“No.” Shoveling it in.
School time approaches and David begins his daily reenactment of Zeno's paradox, a false conundrum first proposed by Zeno, concerning Achilles and how the closer it came time to go to school the slower Achilles moved and the less he heard from the surrounding world, until he entered an entirely different space-time continuum interacting very weakly with this one. Wondering how Neutrino Boy can ever have become so absentminded, his father reads the coffee cups while grinding the beans for his little morning pitcher of Greek coffee. He used to drink espresso, a coffee drink made by vapor extraction, but recently he has advanced to a muddy Greek coffee he makes himself, savoring the smells as he works. On Mars the thinner atmosphere would not allow him to smell things as well, and so nothing there would taste as good as this morning coffee. In fact it might be a culinary nightmare on Mars, everything tasting like dust, partly because it was dusty. But they would adjust to that if they could.
“Are you ready yet?”
“What?”
He bundles Tim into the bike cart with a bowl of cereal, bikes behind David through the village to school. It is late summer at the 37th latitude north, and flowers spangle the sides of the bike path. Clouds puff like puffy clouds in the sky. “If we were biking to school on Mars it would be easier to pedal but we'd be colder.”
“On Venus we'd be colder.”
Schoolyard full of kids. “Have a good day at school. Listen to your teacher.”
“What?”
He pedals to Tim's day-care, drops him off, then rides quickly home. There he writes a list of things to do, which makes him feel virtuous and helps to organize his inchoate feeling that there is too much to do, which in itself is helpful, which leads him to think that things aren't really as bad as he thought, which gives him the inspiration to turn the list into a paper airplane and shoot it at the trash can. Not that any causation can be deduced from this sequence. But things will work out. Or not.
He decides that before working he will mow his lawn. You have to mow a yard before the grass reaches knee high, especially if you use a push mower, which he does, for reasons ecological, aesthetic, athletic, and psychopathological. His next-door neighbor waves to him and he stops abruptly, stunned by a realization. “On Mars these grass clippings would fly out the mower right over my head! I'd have to pull the basket behind me somehow! But the grass wouldn't be as green.”
“You don't think so?” says the neighbor.
Back inside to recover the list and check off mowing. Then he rushes to his desk ready to write. Immense concentration brought to bear instantaneously, or at least as soon as another cup of black mud hits the bloodstream. The first word for the day comes quickly:
“The”
Of course it might not be the right word. He considers it. Time passes in a double helix of eternal no-time, in the blessing that cannot be spoken. He revises, rewrites, restructures. The phrase grows, shrinks, grows, shrinks, changes color. He tries it as free verse, sestina, mathematical equation, glossolalia. Finally he returns to the original formulation, complexifying it with an added nuance: