280
And where the white road crests, and crests again
In grander and still grander openings
Over ravines so deep their dark is cold,
And the hills’ heads dance along the horizon,
And the sun shines as brilliantly as noon
But from the side, and silence is a sigh
Of all things settling into a new way;
There the known stranger catches up with Chance,
Quietly, as if it were no moment,
And they keep pace unspeaking for a while.
290
Chance is surprised, seeing whom they have sent;
And knows at once that his death is now here.
He had not thought it would be quite so soon;
Admires the cleanness and address they show.
As the sun bleeds over the remote sea
The temple rises up upon the ridge:
Built by Iktinos to the god of light
Apollo Epikouros, succorer
In sickness, now grown about with flowers;
It’s seen no sacrifice two thousand years.
300
The place is quite deserted, but for one
Old man with a donkey and a squint eye,
Stained white whiskers and a powdery voice,
Who offers them a primitive reed pipe
Carved on the spot amid the smell of straw,
A smell so pungent it is frightening.
They are surprised; such sights were frequent once,
But the new Greece affords them seldom now.
They buy a flute and leave; but when they reach
The temple entrance and look back, he’s gone.
310
Though roofless, the adyton is in darkness.
Strange Ionic columns tower up;
Huge dim spur walls split the sanctuary;
A red blade of sunset sweeps the floor
With two long shadows, indistinguishable
But that the one is left, the other right.
While Tripitaka waits, Chance makes his tour;
The stars come out as if they shot a needle
Through the attenuated fabric of
The day, to sew the bodies of the heroes
320
Into eternal constellated forms.
By the last light Chance shares the food he’s brought
With his quiet young executioner.
Chance talks lightly over dinner of
The Greek mystery; how from that bright noon
Of classical achieved perfection in
This life—thought, art, the dance of war, the sharp
And plangent sweetness of their poetry—
They turned away into ages of worship,
Of mysticism and forgetfulness,
330
Of ikons stylized into fleshless gold,
As if a thousand years of divine dream
Must follow and blot out the memory
Of one age of human excellence;
But how meanwhile another Greece was born:
Of peasant pleasures, wine and pallikares—
For contemplation of eternity
Must turn to innocence, and innocence
Enacted is the body of lived time;
And thus Pythagoras was right to say
340
The soul must be incarnate once again
After its purifying in the stream.
Just before turning in Chance glances up
At Tripitaka, like a trusting child
At bed time; “Give me your promise you will
Let me live out the night and see the dawn;
I’ll be quite happy if I see the dawn.”
First light. The two men wake together, look
At each other shyly as they stretch,
Like bride and groom on that first changed morning
350
Of the honeymoon. Chance has had a dream
About the last summer that Rose and he
Dwelt in the house of Devereux before
They separated—though they did not know it
At the time, forever. The children were
Grown up, and traveling, or working now
Out in the plains of Mars, and could not break
The perfect intimacy of a dying marriage.
And it was infinitely sweet; adulteries
Of feeling, freedoms opening to worlds
360
Of grief, and loss, and new manners of being.
They picnicked grandly by the Evenlode,
Silver, champagne, white linen, lovemaking
Where she was muslin and Chanel, and he
Was gallantry and stallions, as tireless as
The trunked elephant, tender as swansdown.
But this was all at last a violation of
Her being, a penetration to her inner soul,
A crime, a crime worse than a rape, a taking
By the achieved triumph of the will
370
Of the last citadel of female dream.
The very perfectness of difference
Between the man and woman was the blade
That severed their connection, and they knew it.
Rose could not keep her Chance and save her soul.
And now in earnest the two men must decide
How this thing is to be done; amateurs
Of such an act, as any man must be
Who steps upon a new planet of the soul
And sets out on an act that must transfigure
380
And translate the personality of
Him who acts, unrecognizable
To him before who contemplated action;
A metamorphosis into a new
Species, with terrifying organs formed
For purposes unknown to their possessor.
Like two boys trying homosexuality
They catch each other’s eye and, sheepish, smile,
Get serious. “Well, how’s it done?” asks Chance.
The sky is turquoise. Mountains float like veils
390
Of black silk southeast towards Lacedaemon.
Chance is a strong man. He attacks at once,
Gets in one blow. But Tripitaka spins;
His left heel smashes Chance’s knee, his elbow
Crushes the ribcage, and Chance coughs up blood.
Horribly clumsy work. The rising sun
Strikes on the altar. Chance struggles up, smiles,
For after all he is there in the world
As happy as he always was; attacks again.
Then Tripitaka breaks his neck and throws
400
His body down the dewy chasm of night.
It is two years later, at the delayed funeral of Chance on Mars, where he has asked to be buried. We learn of the death of Freya, whether by suicide or at the hands of her guards, and of the Concordat of Taos whereby the rebels gained their independence. Comet Kali falls upon the plains of Mars, providing heat, water, and gas for the planet in its transformation by higher and higher forms of life. Charlie Lorenz, Freya’s widower, courts Freya’s sister Beatrice, and Hillel Sharon, general of the Martian forces, courts both Ximene and Marisol.
Scene v:
The Death of the Comet
Butterfly’s wing: the name the spacemen give
To this new terrain of the northern plains
Where gently undulating country glows
With the soft fire of a thousand pigments.
Here the next stage of ecogenesis
Has reached its climax in a magic carpet
Of golden furs and powdery crimsons,
Spore-yellows, saturated browns and blues,
Purples shot with greens, and fleshy pinks,
10
Open mild glitterings of slimes and foams:
The saprophytes that feed on defunct germs,
Funguses, orchidoids, mycetozoa,
Slime
molds with delicate sporangia
Like little lampshades, phalluses, or combs,
Formed from the mobile eggwhite of that mass
Of naked zygotes called plasmodium;
Yeasts in their glorious and rancid forms;
The air softened with spores and protoplasts.
No breathing yet; for Ganesh Wills has drawn
20
Their metabolic plan as anaerobes
Though now already there are swathes of ruin
Where richer belts of oxygen have burnt
The tender membranes and the naked tissue
Of organisms not inured or bred
To that strong caustic and hard stimulant.
The cortege has come out a mile or more—
Perhaps a hundred men and women, each
With a black band about the shoulder armor
Of their space suits; a pair of smaller figures
30
Who must be children, in the honored place,
Hand in hand behind the pallbearers.
The two refrigerated caskets ride
At the vanguard, draped with the flag of Mars—
A crimson snake in style reminiscent
Of the pennon of the thirteen colonies
(Don’t Tread On Me), but standing on its tail
Coiled in an open helix, with a ruff
Of wings at its neck, on a field of green.
Over each flag is laid a body band
40
In black, marked with the sigil VRE.
Above them in the hazy evening sky
Streams a huge portent, like a flaming ghost:
The comet Kali, in its final fall
Upon the many-colored fields of Mars.
And so to interpose a little ease.
What story shall I tell about this puzzle,
This other casket, borne along with Chance?
There was the coverup, of course; the clerk
Of court suborned, no record of parole,
50
Counsellor Vico’s testimony void;
The doctor’s electronic tag a myth;
The prisoner’s attempted getaway;
The honest guard’s pursuit; the last attempt
By Chance that morning on the mountainside
To slip his captor, and his fatal stumble.
Consider Tripitaka, who must now,
The first time in his life, embrace a lie;
And who knows what amazement of blood guilt
That Garrison must know when he remembers
60
How his permission had empowered Gaea’s;
And as for her, a sudden recollection
Of sweetest love along the river Glyme
As if this sacrifice had set the old Rose free.
But still I temporize and put it off.
Let it be my responsibility
To knock and enter Freya’s prison cell
And tell her of her father. Chance to me
Has come to be the purpose of this story
And it’s a dull place without him; if his fire
70
Survive in Freya, let her walk the road
That some have traveled to that other country
And call him back to us, to take the wheel
Again, and laugh, as we remember him.
And so her face, as pale as death, turns down
That darkened grove where the birds do not sing;
Her fury passes all the gates as if
She held the bough and honeycomb and lyre
Of passport and safe conduct in that place;
But Freya’s hands are empty as are all
80
Who’d drink in purity the elixir
Of cold communion with the vanished dead.
And that whole country is in truth deserted;
No schools of spirits flock like autumn leaves;
Picture a funpark in the winter, or
The cellars of a bombed and sodden ruin.
As she thrusts on into the dark, the cave
Shrinks to a funnel, like the painted streets
Of the perspective theater, a daub
Of plaster-dust that, to the audience,
90
Appears a tall Palladian thoroughfare
That might if followed to the vanishing point
Take us beyond the city wall to fields,
And hills, and an Arcadian summer sky.
But Freya finds him in the end; he’s thrown
Like a bundle of old clothes in a corner,
His arms about his knees, almost asleep.
“Chance my old love, my daddy-prince, my be
Boss, my gallant general, come back to us;
Why do you hide your head and turn away?”
100
She takes him by the shoulder and would kiss
His bloodstained hair; a moment then as if
He recognizes her and smiles a little
In forgetfulness, a child in a dream;
His cheek works as he might be now about
To speak, but nothing comes, and that intent
But distant look, that strange preoccupation
Falls again, and Freya almost angry
Shakes her dead father like a spoiled child.
Slowly, and mutedly compared to him
110
Who sent his ships across the fells of space,
Chance starts to speak. “Look for me there, my love.
Back where the dawn is coming, where my eyes
Are growing in the head of spring. My voice
Is almost gone already. It’s the children
Calling me. All that were here have heard
And have departed for the world, or else
They never were. It’s hard to speak. We are
The corner of the present you may turn
At any time, and be in paradise.”
120
With this he falls asleep; do what she may,
Freya cannot arouse him any more.
But when at last she stands and takes her leave
She finds no landmark and no blaze to show
The way she came. No clue or chart is here
Permitted, and no poet has power to guide.
After a little while she understands;
There is no coming back from where she is.
Nor can she find her father’s waiting-place;
But not unhappy, for she feels the change,
130
That gift of all she is into the world,
Not, for a woman, so unlike the melting
Of the breast into the baby’s soft gums,
That last negation of all negatives,
The waking to the freedom of the world,
The settlement upon the edge of spring
Where the new moment finds its genesis.
But if I tell this story, it’s forbidden
To reveal another tale: what was the truth
Of what the jailors and the councilors
140
Discovered in the morning in her cell:
The body dangling, the knotted belt,
The black tongue, and the green and open eyes.
Those of the party of the colonists
Said that the UN guards had murdered her
On Gaea’s orders, to complete the work;
The inquest though returned a clear verdict:
Suicide while of unbalanced mind.
Freya returns to Mars now with her father.
This was not all. Another morning dawned
150
With the empyreal brightness of the summer
Turning into fall, in Greece, a land
That’s seen such happenings before, and scorns
To dim her daybreaks for the tears of men;
And a scared steward found upon its bed
The body, swollen out of recognition,
Self-poisoned, of the traitor Orval Root.
For h
e had kept his faith to Chance’s daughter
And followed her beyond the world of lies.
But still the funeral proceeds, the music
160
Of the band rings tinnily in the earphones,
Playing an old march, Chance’s favorite,
A sad bullfighter’s dirge from Mexico;
And there ahead a scaffold is set up
Just at the projected point of impact
Of comet Kali, blazing overhead
A portent and a glory from a dream.
The cortege halts; the caskets are manhandled
Up to the apex of the pyramid.
About the scaffold stand the conquistadors:
170
Beatrice white-faced, her eyes like coals;
Charlie by her, and the twins, Wolf and Irene;
Ganesh with big tears running down his face;
Sumikami carried by two strong men
(All these released according to provisions
The Taos Concordat framed in ’thirty-four);
Commander de Vivar; her rebel daughter
Marisol, relieved of her command,
Elected to the planetary council
Upon the ticket of the pacifists;
180
Hillel Sharon, with his guerrilla’s slouch;
And many others of the freedom forces,
Space men and women, farmers, engineers,
Members of council, artists, gardeners.
Now follows on the office of the dead:
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye/
To put on bodies incorruptible/
Et lux perpetua/ in die illa/
Tuba mirum spargens sonum/ teste
David cum Sibylla/ confutatis/
190
Flammis acribus addictis/ quasi
Cinis/ lacrymosa/ dona eis
Requiem, aeternam requiem.
We shall be changed we shall be changed we shall.
But now they must make haste, because already
Winds are blowing, full of spores, over
The glowing and grotesque domains of Mars,
And little earthquakes make the footing awkward;
The comet minutely enlarges, and the klaxons
Wail as apocalypse from dome and tower.
200
Across the planet the last prep teams
Embark on shuttles and escape to orbit;
Others upon the far side of the globe,
Scared volunteers, descend to hardened bunkers,
Ready to monitor the banks of sensors
Designed to tell if Kali’s a success.
Eleven hours to cometstrike. No garden
Ever in the history of the world
(Unless old Terra in the fiery days
Of coalescence when the stars were young
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 14
