Garrison could not take his eyes from him
Whose neck and chest were mottled with a lupus;
Each bout he fought he seemed to stand away
As in another world, and brushed aside,
With a grave courtesy, the kicks and blows
They rained on him; until in one swift turn
He shocked the block aside and foot or hand
Stopped with a snap a centimeter deep
Into the skin of face or throat or belly,
So that the strike was known but did no damage;
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But had the foot firmed, the hip swiveled to,
The shoulder briefly locked, the elbow turned,
A shock wave would have spread from fist or foot
That would have broken bone and burst the organ.
There was no question who would face the master.
This fellow was a swart bemuscled toad,
Of whom experience had made its stone;
The students bore on forearm, brow and rib
The blue and white contusions of his touch.
Now Tripitaka changed, and seemed to draw
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In toward the place and time of combat;
Lightly he breathed, in, out, in, out, and neared
And firmed with each breath until the master must,
Or be dishonored, close with this strange boy;
But each time that his deep karate grunt,
The kia yell that concentrates the body,
Shook the plain boards of the pinewood dojo,
Another, shriller scream of aroused chih,
A terrifying, gorgonish response
Rode up and over the more human sound;
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The master’s blow was caught and held and stopped
In the boy’s open palm; the counterstrike,
A stinging uraken, went snakelike in
To cheekbone, throat, or temple; disallowed
As customary in this style, for its known weakness—
And Sergeant Grace, the judge, must show no favor.
But the toad giant is incensed, and now
He spins and takes grotesquely to the air,
And when his heel misses the boy’s turned head,
His elbow catches him across the neck;
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A dirty blow, but legal in these rules.
And Tripitaka reels; a thread of blood
Slips from the corner of his nose; a sigh
Breaks from poor Garrison, seeing the stretched
Tendon of the boy’s ankle, the beauty
Of his skin beslicked with sweat, where it
Is not deformed by its grey carapace.
But Tripitaka squats, and breathes, his hands
Open and cross each other into block;
His young shoulders under the crisp white canvas
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Seem to swell and take a deeper shape;
And now he sweeps a great stride forward, in-
To the inner miai of his partner;
Amazed and almost ready to abandon
The contest with the injured boy, the master
Seeks to conclude the bout with a head blow;
But Tripitaka rises from the stance,
And slightly turns, and his hand shoots up high
Into the rising block, from which his hips,
Recoiling, drive a five inch strike into
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The breastbone of the heavy man before him;
His kia scream glides on into a croon
Of achieved penetration into truth;
But every soldier feels the solid crack
Of breakage as the master chokes and falls.
Garrison asks and gets an interview
With the strange youth whose nickname is Don John:
This deformed warrior has won his soul.
For who but he, as pure as mother nature,
Bears in his flesh such sign of unsuccess?
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—Such antidote against his father’s power?
And who but he can be his mother’s foil?
And who but he shall be his acolyte
And heart-squire in the imminent crusade?
The warrior’s thoughts are harder to unravel.
For Tripitaka’s life is toil and pain,
A saint’s soul in the body of a hero;
He has been always lonely, perforce pure,
Seeking a light that he might follow where
The act might be commensurate with what
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He knew as perfect from forgotten dreams.
“Don” has known only athletes and rough soldiers,
Who seek and follow what’s before their noses;
And that a man, as it must seem to him,
Might be as dedicate as Garrison,
Is marvelous to him, a women’s child.
The fire of faith now spreads from man to man;
The drunken joy of full humility—
That passion which is cruelest of all,
When it possesses history, and casts,
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Weeping with sacrifice and exaltation,
Its own children into the sacred pyres—
That sweet humility has caught the boy
Who will be master of the martial games.
Return to the parade ground in the sun;
The flags, the morning light on Flinders Dome;
It’s 2033 and Tripitaka,
Now twenty-two, is in the final training
To fight in next year’s Spring Olympiad
Against the warriors of Indonesia.
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But now he’s called out from the ranks to hear
A new assignment, something of an honor;
There must, as customary, be a guard
Drawn from the gladiators of all nations
To serve the World Court as it hears its cases
And hold its prisoners lest they escape.
A major case is pending now: the trial
Of Chance Van Riebeck and his daughter Freya
And as accomplices her husband Lorenz,
And—in absentia unless he’s caught—
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The boy Ganesh, who healed Tripitaka.
There will be time to join his ranks again
Before the battle—it is early May—
And therefore there is no excuse to shirk
What for the young man must be a trial
As terrible as that of Chance and Freya.
With these commands Don John acquires a shadow:
A person of the journalist persuasion.
To speak more truly, he’s a book reviewer
Who writes and teaches little free-verse poems;
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The newspaper has run out of reporters
For this, the juiciest of cases; “Bill,”
Then, is all that they could muster in the pinch.
Bill’s an existentialist from way back,
And likes the chance to be a hardnosed hack;
He is the conscience of the writing class,
The censor who lets only smallness pass.
Ah, Bill, you ask an ode of me, lest you
And all your brothers vanish with the dew;
Your virtues are not trumpet-tongued, and must
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Be duly whistled ere they turn to dust.
First, a becoming modesty of style;
The aspirations of a crocodile;
A Shiite mullah’s open-mindedness,
A moral backbone of boiled watercress;
All the prophetic vision of a sheep
(But not so witty, and not quite as deep);
A diction as unblemished by a thought
As is a baby’s bottom by a wart;
You stand in the traditions of our art
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As a blocked artery in a dying heart.
Bill wishes he could cover Chance van Riebeck,
> And pen a think-piece on his alien science,
His inhumane ambitions, and his pride,
And poke some fun at his huge oddities,
And then get serious, and deplore his fame,
And ponder why the immature still hearken
After the sentimental monsters of
An arrogant and violent history.
For now publicity is wallowing
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Across the prostrate planet like a bull;
That god who truly eats his children roars
From the videos and ganged gates of the tube;
All is now common, and the story is
As much the same as any other story
As ingenuity and art can make it.
Above, a drama plays itself to death:
Ganesh’s shuttle, veiled by clouds of dream
Spun by his guardians, the softworm clones,
Is sought by radar-blinded hunters, blun-
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Dering across the occultations of
The acrid stars and thin sardonic moons;
Tiny outjettings carry him away
Until he’s almost safe within the cone
The pole’s auroras cast into the sky;
But one last probe breaks through his webbed defense,
And he must murmur “Shit!” and snap his fingers,
Cruelly outgunned and naked in the heavens.
Captive, my peers, unanxious as the dawn,
Founders, foundering in the brass beast’s maw,
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What recourse is there left? but listen. Listen.
Act II
The Trial of Chance
Chance and Freya go on trial in the World Court at Olympia in Greece. Tripitaka has become the jailor of Chance. Ruhollah the drug merchant, also on trial, indoctrinates Garrison and Tripitaka into the Chiffre, the extreme Ecotheist sect that holds all of nature to be evil.
Scene i:
The Gathering of the Prisoners
Cicadas, little stridulators, sing,
With your wings and widow’s walking-sticks.
Even the shade here blazes with a light
That lit Pausanias’s chin when he lay down
To nap beneath the planes of Ilida.
Kronion oak-canopied smells of honey,
Smells of old fireplaces and ritual straw;
Mount of the old one, the phage of seed,
Presider in the Arcadian golden age.
10
Half covered up in leaves, a drum of stone
Reminds the traveler of the price of time;
And if the eye of Titian or Giorgione
Could for the nonce condense out of the sky—
Out of this blue so bright it turns to gold,
It turns to a gold-leaf iconostasis—
Then such an eye should draw out from the ever-
Brilliant bourn of the immortals the form
Of the goddess resident invisible,
Rhea, perhaps, or her bloodier mother
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Gaea, but pictured in their ripest girlhood
Lovely and languid, undimmed by the shade,
And virgin yet of world-mastering Jove.
Dorian interlude! Between the boles
Mottled and peeled to bone-white, lemon, choc-
Olate is seen a pastoral landscape far
Empurpled with the masks and folds of ether
Where Cladeus swift-flowing winds to join
Alpheus risen from high Arcady
Impatient now to dive beneath the ocean
30
And rise, the Latin muse, in Sicily.
Closer we see, upon the plain beneath,
Palaestral ruins and a stadium:
Temples to Zeus and Hera, for this place
Is, as the acute observer swiftly learns,
The holy precinct of Olympia.
And in the foreground bosky and imbrown’d
As Claude had painted it, we can make out
A man reclining by a bower of ivy;
And further off, another squats alert,
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Patient, watching the first, arms on his knees:
Some subject like the sleep of Ulysses
Attended by Athena as a youth,
Might justify the master’s jeu d’esprit.
This moment seems a painted summary
Of one gold millennial afternoon,
But pastoral must fall to history.
The intent warrior with slitted eyes
Is Tripitaka, and the sleeping man,
His curled black hair among the plane tree roots,
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His small beard like a Nicholas Hilliard,
Is Chance van Riebeck dreaming of a time
When the dead words and thoughts of constant trial
Were past forever, and the age begun
When bees and dragonflies might dance all day
Above the slipping waters with the sun
In an enchanted syrtis piedmontane
Of piney, muslin-lighted, poppied Mars.
And these brief sleeps of his are those from which
You wake up weakened, weeping without cause,
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The whole weight of things pressing on your heart.
It is their custom, trial being adjourned,
To walk and breathe here in the World Court grounds,
Though their sparse talk is brief and full of pain;
For Chance’s guard is as oppressed as Chance,
Envies the sleeping man his hour of sleep—
And how can you forgive your friend and healer
When you betray him daily in his eyes?
—Of constant trial. Each morning Chance is woken
For breakfast with his counsel, Giamba Vico.
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Next he is led across the World Court compound
Into the auditorium of glass
And Swedish wood, now shabbier with use,
And takes his stand behind the microphone,
Protected from the public by a screen
Of bulletproof and polarizing glass;
Till noon the fading drone of arguments,
Of motions to throw out some article
Or other of the tangled net of charges
Wherein he struggles, and of challenges
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And quashings, pleas, approaches to the bench,
Have turned the vibrant air of Greece to dust
And cobwebs, bearing dried and shriveled flies.
Sometimes he watches Freya in her box
Of glass across the courtroom, and she smiles
Palely through grey reflections at his glance;
This is the only contact they’re allowed.
His other entertainment is to follow
Through brief encounters in the corridors
And overheard remarks among the guards
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The progress of a big concurrent trial:
The case of Ruhollah the drug merchant.
Addiction’s commonplace in this new world;
Perhaps a half of the earth’s population—
Shrinking already, though the demographic
Fishtraps of the central cities have not yet
Brought on the midcent crash—is now on drugs.
Synthesized endorphins, built to mimic
Perfectly the brain’s own self-reward,
Have driven out the weaker herbal resins,
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Cocaine, cannabinol, and heroin—
Ruhollah is the richest man on earth
And he is being tried for his profession.
He makes an interesting argument:
That Penth, the drug, is only natural,
And if as ecotheist truth reveals,
We are the violators of the world,
The enemies of heaven’s wilderness,
And if the use of Penth makes us forgo
The work that our dist
orted nature levies
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Upon us in exchange for its reward,
So much the better for the groaning planet.
What strikes the intrigued Chance about this line
Is not its depth but the apparent fact
That in the Court’s terms it’s unanswerable.
But further, Chance is really fascinated
With the mind that might propose such reasoning:
For if it could believe its argument,
Surely it could not have conceived it;
But, disingenuous, his words are satire
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Against the very truth that he invokes—
But not the satire of a humanist;
He must be speaking from a place of insight
To which the natural is as defiled
As is humanity to those who try him.
Chance checks the prison library
And finds Ruhollah’s reading Simone Weil.
But in the afternoons he has permission
Under the eye of his unsleeping guard
To take his exercise among the pines
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That Hitler planted round the stadium,
And walk the stoa and colonnade of Nero,
And climb the lower slopes of Kronion
Bought by the European parliament
And built with chalets for the delegates.
So monotheism must always raise
Its temples on the leveled pyramids
Of ancient gods who in the twilight mourn
And rend their garments and their lovely hair,
Flee shrieking into darker grots and caves
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Than any censed by smoke and oracles.
(O I am here like mad Pound caged in Pisa;
I am the Stupid Dog the shaman drives
Out of the village with the village sins
Piled on his aching back. O my lord Chance
Dead these many years ago, my greyhound,
My Montefeltro, my John Carter of Mars,
Who laughed and strove through every mortal doubt,
Give me the strength to see your enemies
As you would see them, with that fierce compassion,
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That breathtaking impartiality
That you poured out in bounty to the world.)
Perhaps Chance hears this prayer from the future;
For he wakes, almost with a groan, and sees
The eyes of Tripitaka glittering
As if they glared out through the steel visor
Of the mooned helmet of a samurai.
“Back to the world, then,” Chance says with a smile.
Now Tripitaka stands but does not speak.
Chance goes on lightly: “Don’t take it so hard,
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 9
