Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

by Frederick Turner

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.

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  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

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  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,