Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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I think, that Nature speaks and justifies
In us, when we take the great spade of thought
And art and potent action to the garden;
Nature as you implied makes her own values,
Of which the human is executor.
Our enemies must not claim all the prayers
Nor all the mysteries…though I myself
Feel a strange weakness come upon me now
When dealing with these matters, as if I
Were not the destined one to make them plain.”
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“Then do not lose this battle, Chance, whatever
Is the cost. You owe it to that future
Where your predicted prophet may be born
To lead the forces of enlightenment.”
“You are persuasive, but, my friend, suppose
That prophet’s purposes were better served
By my destruction in the name of Nature?”
“Promise me this at least: you’ll think about it.
I’ve asked for a recess; we’ll know tomorrow.
But prosecution won’t object. They’re panicked
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And they need the time. World Court tradition
Gives you some perks: one of them is parole.
Take a vacation. Be a bindlestiff
And wander in Arcadia awhile.
That’s what you used to do to clear your mind;
You may feel different when you return.”
Next morning, an announcement on all channels:
“This is the provisional government
Of Free Mars and the moons of Jupiter.
Last week our mining ship Kalevala
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Broke out of orbit a Saturnian moon.
By next October, in the northern skies,
The comet Kali, as it has been called,
Will start to show a luminescent tail.
Then a mid-course correction will be made
Diverting it out of its present orbit
(Which intersects with Earth’s) so that it falls
To planned collision on the plains of Mars.
This action is a part of Project Ares
And is designed to supplement the gas
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Envelope of our birthing planet
In preparation for the higher lifeforms.
The government of Mars humbly requests
That by October the United Nations
Extend full diplomatic recognition
To this our sovereign state and free republic.
In token of good faith we call a truce
And cease-fire in this long and wasteful conflict,
Leading to an exchange of prisoners,
A full negotiated settlement,
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And peace in the mansions of humankind.”
During a recess in the trial, Chance walks in Arcadia. Gaea misinterprets her son’s words as giving consent to her plan, and accordingly sends Tripitaka to assassinate Chance.
Scene iv:
The Fall of Chance
Once I was the master of the puppets
And fruit ripened about my gilded head;
Out of my fingertips the music flowed,
My shoulders shone in heroism’s sun.
But now my characters with their fierce selves
Wring me through until I am their servant,
The grizzled artisan of their ambition;
My capable hands are numb with the work.
And though I know indeed that haste makes waste
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Still, I may well enough waste not the time;
And though I care but little for my death
The careful making asks more than I have.
And I shall not be saved, unless I’m saved
By playing out my dark part in their play.
We have not come a third of this long journey,
And I fear, I fear, the labor that’s to come,
And I fear the necessary encounter
With Gaea in the greatness of her fate,
The greatness of the fury she endures.
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Despite her pride, she comes to Garrison,
Her speech unformed, distrait, and without grace.
“It was a lie, Garrison, a sheer lie.
The comet’s headed not for us but Mars.
Our people in ballistics have confirmed it,
But no one in the public is to know.
He’s very clever, Garrison. If we
Reveal the fraud, the public thinks we’re lying;
Or if they do believe, the Martian rebels
Get such good press we’ll have to ask for peace.
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It’s not as if they’ve even made a threat;
And each delay puts us more in the wrong.
What do we do now? what is there to do?”
One thing aches now in Gaea’s mind—the face
Of Chance her husband in its victory.
If this one man were not to come again
The world might still be safe against the future
And we might all be saved by growing in
To the sweet human fellowship of fault
And shared weakness, which is the truth of being.
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But Garrison is thinking other thoughts:
How truth must be revealed at any cost,
How in the end the liar is destroyed
However wise or clever is the lie.
They must inform the Press and take the heat.
But he is too afraid of Gaea’s will
To say what’s in his thought; yet now he sees
A light dawn in his mother’s face, a pure
Clean honesty he knows he recognizes.
“There’s only one thing to be done,” she says.
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“But it’s too much for me to do alone.
You, Garrison, know what I mean. Give me
The word, and I shall have the strength to do it.”
Garrison takes her in his arms (and feels,
Always surprised, how hot her body is);
And says “Of course that’s what we have to do.”
But what he means is tell the world the truth;
And what she means is that now Chance must die.
Alpheus before dawn; a swart star slides
On the water; a smell of elderberries,
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Distant hayfields, smoke and olive trees;
Dry reeds rattling in the light morning breeze.
Chance in his walking shoes, picking his way
Along the old path Ulysses once took
Raiding for cattle in the Peloponnese;
He feels a sting and stiffness in his breast
Where the bead radio tracer was implanted,
But otherwise he’s free. A nightingale
Is winding up its song; a milky light
As fresh as porcelain begins to glow.
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Three miles up river there’s a shallow ford
Where the flow bubbles over pebblestones
And here he strikes off to the south. The cocks
Are crowing in the farmyards now; upon the ridge
There stands the blazing wheel of Helios
And every shadow is arrayed with dew.
His stout shoes squelching on the fanged basalt
He climbs up to the heights of Arcady.
Over the ridges rises up the ghost
Of Erimanthos thirty miles away.
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And now the breeze dies down and the great heat
Of the Greek inland lights its glassy fumes;
A heat that concentrates and does not spill
The strength of men, but works a mesmerism.
The clunk of goat-bells spells a sort of drug
That stuns the ear and makes it listen to
The inner sound of the world’s cruel joy,
Its heartle
ss reinvention of itself
Despite and through all tragedy and satire;
The silenes, the sly kallikanzaroi,
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Can lead the sunburned traveler astray,
Dazed with the heatstroke and the smell of sage,
From all worldly cares to the Nereid’s caves,
Where those good ladies for a butterfly kiss
Will steal the eyes’ motion and the soul of man.
By noon he’s come into a waste of hills,
Barren, horizonless, smelling of darkish resins;
Each summit shows a further slope of stones,
Squat black holm-oak, rosemary and thorns.
He feels the loneliness of all last places,
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Places with the black shade of dreams mixed in
With their transcendent brightness; like the country
Of Death, of all irremediable change;
So that the heart sighs, and sighs once again
With the yearning, the loss, the joy of fate.
But slipping down a dusty water-course
He comes on an abandoned olive-grove,
With a house like a white cube, and another
With a blue door off its hinges, a church
With an almond tree beside it, and a spring.
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Here is a great cushion of fresh green grass
Spangled with golden flowers, and a trough
Of limpid water in the semi-shade.
He looks into the darkened barrel-vault:
There a gold mail of haloes blazes over
A crowd of gaunt-eyed saints with oxblood robes
And chasubles of azure, white and green;
Their eyes stare from the blind katholikon,
The domed narthex, the iconostasis.
Chance leaves a sacrifice of cakes and oil
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And settles down beside the spring to eat.
First he unwraps a moist clothful of olives
And smooths it out upon a sunny stone.
Then he cracks off a heel of dense grey bread
To soak the oil up; gets out feta cheese,
Crumbling and warm, retrieves the jug of wine
Where it is cooling in the spring, and last
He says a prayer to the local Potencies;
A fit collation for the petty gods.
After his meal, he feels a sweet languor
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Like a spring fever or convalescence;
And sleeps as happy as a mortal may
Wrenched as we are by spirit’s purposes.
Afternoon narcolepsies sometimes lead
To terrors of the soul. Chance wakes in grief
With a dream he cannot remember; the ridge
Whence he came seems drenched with the shade of death.
But now he makes his heart happy, a trick
Peculiar to the Van Riebeck line,
Striking once or twice a generation.
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And he’s rewarded; at the next high summit
A valley opens to the west, and over
Its shoulder towers an azure vase of ocean
Glazed with the track of the redeeming sun;
A valley full of sound like talk and song—
The chuckle of an irrigation channel
Running with ceaseless swiftness down the ridge.
Chance kneels and cups his hands; so heavy is
The current that he’s sprayed at once, and scarcely
Takes a palmful at each sip. What bounty
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Is this life, thinks Chance; can I give it back?
That evening he has gained the Pyrgos road
And turning east he comes in the clear dusk
To the straw-warm village of Kallithea.
A tiny kafeneion; he must needs
Pass through an arch, across a stucco bridge
Over a street of caged birds, lights, and voices
To a rooftop where he’s served under the sky.
A waiter most mournful and witty brings
A shot glass of cold ouzo, and some bread,
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A salad of thin yellow sliced tomatoes
Sprinkled with fresh salt, sour wine vinegar,
Pepper and bits of dried oregano.
A lamb stifado follows, like at Easter,
With half an icy bottle of retsina;
Then weeping baklava and thick sweet coffee
And a glass of fierce raki with the waiter.
The stars are shining on the mountaintops
Of Minthe, Likaion, Arcadia;
Chance cannot see his soiled and darkened Mars.
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He wakes next morning in a flood of sunlight
Poured through the open shutter of his lodging;
In air like crystal he sees sharp and clear
A hillside still in shadow, juniper,
Dwarf cypress, chaparral; he thinks of Taos.
Voices of children in the morning hum.
Far over the rooftops there is a man
In silhouette, looking in his direction;
He turns away at once. But Chance’s mood
Has lost its first elation, and his mind,
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At breakfast, turns to matters of the trial.
Perhaps the threat of Kali gives him room
To make his little argument in court
And take the mantle of the Natural
From those who, to his thinking, had usurped it.
As he prepares to leave, he suddenly knows
That he is being stalked. He’s not surprised;
They’ll want to be assured he’ll keep his word
And not collude with allies in his case.
But Chance is only half right, for his stalker
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Has taken other orders than the spy’s,
And Gaea has got back her voice again.
“It’s time now, you who are called Tripitaka,
To render up the meaning of your choices,
To yield upon the altar of the will
The uttermost sanctity of a good
Unhonored and most honorable so;
To do a thing the whole world would condemn
And then conceal it, so that punishment
May never expiate the stain of crime,
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Nor honesty redeem the filthy burden;
To do this thing as the one sacrifice
(All other trials and masteries passed through,
Made good, and therefore unrepeatable,
Therefore unfit for offerance to God,
To the divine that’s tired of all deception,
Of every sacrifice of bones and hide,
Of fat or foreskins, rams instead of sons)—
The perfectest oblation, found and free
Of every mortal taint and close reward.
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I want this good man’s heart, his head upon
A platter, his blood poured out on the earth;
I want it for no purpose of my own
But all to justify the living God
And heal the sores upon Her lovely body,
And purge the affliction from Her Purities
That multiplies there in this last of times,
This testing of the virtue of the world.”
And what can Don John do but take the vow,
Given the warring sicknesses he bears,
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The callings and the crimes of both his parents
The saintly genius he took from the womb?
That was two days ago; the pastoral
Of Chance is not yet done, the journey has
—As every moment of this sweet life has—
Infinite byways, easy backwaters,
Fractal inscription of the senses’ charm
Into the graceful flourishes they make
In their own play upon themselves and in
T
he world they share with in its fabrication.
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An easy walk through vales to Andritsena;
Chance falls asleep that evening in the sway
Of shrill bouzouki tunes, rebetika
By Theodorakis, songs from Athens, sad
Demotika tragoidia from the hills.
It rings in winding chains of love and war,
Statement and counter-statement, and it treats
Of old betrayals, wounded Pallikares.
When all is said and done, he thinks as he
Drifts into dream, it’s just a lovers’ quarrel,
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Just a sad tune projected on the stars.
Next day dawns even hotter than the last.
Chance reckons he can while away the morning
In pleasant temporal commerce in the village
And walk to Vassae in the afternoon—
The goal of this excursion, if it has one—
And see it in the dusk with no one there.
He knows the doctor Iatroyannis, who,
Curator of the temple-grounds, agrees
To furnish for his friend a set of keys.
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It’s market-day. Chance finds a handkerchief
Stitched with dark mulberries, a gift for Gaea,
And at the goldsmith’s, something for his Freya
That he knows she wants: a copy of the mask
Of Agamemnon buried at Mycenae.
Pleased and surprised he finds upon a stall
A perfect match for Beatrice’s stoneware,
White painted with blue and black, that she served
Tequila in to Charlie weeks ago.
He buys some pieces, has them sent along,
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With wood Bucephaluses for the children.
Deciding suddenly that he will stay
The night at Vassae, he gets himself a quilt
Of dull red cotton neatly worked with black,
And shops for wine and bread and good dark cheese;
And navel oranges, honey and yogurt
Made from the creamy milk of nanny-goats:
A breakfast that Chance is not going to need.
An afternoon of blue and beaten gold.
Chance climbs the clear hills in his wide straw hat.
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At each turn of the way between the olives
A fresh access of joy comes over him;
He remembers in quickening freshets
Flavors and scents for which there are no names;
The air of Minthe is empyreal
And by a spring he finds a drift of lilies
Mysterious as childhood, like a vision.
And now he even watches for his friend,
His follower, and hangs back sometimes so
That he may catch up if he has a mind to.