Upon this world of silent growing plants;
Perhaps they miss the fleshmeat in their meals—
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Such petty changes can engender turns
Of the spirit as lonely, dark, and cruel
As any struggle over principle,
Standing in tears amid the alien corn.
Only Sumikami does not feel
These hungers of the disinherited.
Her cares are for the children; her own son
She scarcely dares to think about, he is
So glorious and frightful in her sight,
So inexplicable to her that all
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She knows to do is serve the family
Who saved him from the stroke of the disease.
She sees Irene has the light and grace
Of one who might with training be a priestess
In all the sacrificial arts of beauty.
The child’s slim arm and sensitive long hand
Can seem at perfect rest upon a table
When set there for a moment in her play,
The wristbones at an angle that will take
Your breath away with simple loveliness;
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Her legs are long and sabered like a dancer’s;
And every trembling passage of the spirit
Shows in her face, the white brow shot with pink,
The broad cheekbones, the fine set of the lips.
But this bad girl will answer no instruction
In those arts that the Geisha-san would teach,
Dancing excepted, which she always loved.
She’s clearly bored by clothes and the coiffure;
Laughs at eye-makeup when the time comes round
To try this ancient doctrine of the skin;
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Breaks all her lovely fingernails, or bites them;
Deeply resents the growings on her ribs,
Regards the first bright twitch of monthly blood
As a revenge by Sumikami for
Her inattention in the female school.
Instead she wants to train to be a spy,
And prowl the rotting cities of the Earth,
And steal the riches of the mother planet,
Its heritage of genotypes and genes
Which, as Ganesh has told her, is the lack
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That now increasingly has paralyzed
The work of planoforming here on Mars.
Before the break with Earth, the colonists
Had gathered a great library of plants
In tiny cultures, stored in Phoban vaults;
But there had not been time to do the same
With all the animals that move and breathe
Within the Terran biosphere—a few
Dozen species only have been preserved,
And Earth refuses patent rights until
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The Martian rebels yield their sovereignty
Back to the mother planet. And that vow
The children made when Chance and Freya turned
To fire and air within the death of Kali,
Their vow to kill their evil grandmother
And Garrison her son, is not forgotten.
Irene may not murder Tripitaka as
She wishes that she might, but now instead
She asks him to instruct her in the way
Of death, of strength in violence.
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For Wolf, who was her confidant and friend,
Her bedmate, peer, and co-conspirator,
Has been entirely charmed by little Chance;
And since the contest for the boy’s affection
Seems to be won by Wolf, she is disgusted
By those maternal feelings that had made
Her hold the child for hours in her lap
And be the boy’s maidservant if he wished.
She tells herself she hates her stupid brother.
He has forgotten all their promises
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And plans, and wants to play at being Daddy.
Irene knows that Wolf holds Tripitaka
Almost in awe, as if he were a god;
It would be only justice if it were
She, not her brother, that the hero chose
As his apprentice in the martial arts.
Some children seem to be a lucky gift
—To parents, to the family, to the world.
The second Chance grows up as such a child.
He is a well of sweetness and good humor,
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Neat and methodical without obsession,
Ebullient but sensitive to others,
Wise beyond his years but not sententious.
Not the most graceful nor coordinated
Of all children, Chance can be quite a klutz,
But when they laugh at him he doesn’t mind;
Sometimes he’ll be a very witty clown.
He loves to put on plays and rituals
That can involve at least a dozen people
Whom he will buttonhole in such a way
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That it is quite impossible to refuse.
His gurgling laugh has many imitators;
He gives himself away without reserve.
He’ll be a very giant when he’s grown;
His big limbs shine with a warm animal life.
His goodness carries not a shadow, but
We do not feel with him as with those children
Whose innocence has marked them for some grief,
Or addicthood, or victimhood, or crime.
He is too large and flexible for that;
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His shrewdness is the glory of his sweetness.
Chance is a poet, as it soon turns out;
Not of the epic or the mystic turn,
But in a mode that might remind a lover
Of such things of Herrick or of Horace
In his lighter mood, when celebrating
The Ausonian slopes in glorious September.
His only shade is, that against his will
He’s been the instrument that has divided
Wolf and his sister; all his commonsense
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Cannot avail against a slight foreboding.
Gaea persuades Garrison to marry Bella. A son, Flavius, is born to them. Irene trains in the martial arts under Tripitaka, and seduces him. Tripitaka, in shame, prepares to do away with himself. The Martians agree to exchange their bases and satellites for a complete collection of Terran lifeforms, to continue the transformation of Mars. Tripitaka, interrupted in his suicide, is chosen as the leader of the expedition to bring back in Kalevala, as in an ark, the life of Earth.
Scene v:
The Seductions of Garrison and Tripitaka
Gaea calls Garrison to come and see her.
The Church has sent a van to meet his plane.
The young driver’s grating enthusiasm
Is silenced after the first twenty miles.
They drive through landscapes now distinctly changed
From the remembered England of his childhood:
More natural, perhaps, though farmed in places
With dull efficiency; more like, perhaps,
American midwestern countryside.
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The old is much less obvious; being the sign
Of privilege, it’s faded out of sight,
Ruined and overgrown and not restored,
The nation’s poverty too great to spend
State money on the maintenance of things
When half the population’s over sixty.
But still he feels the heavy joy of heart,
The death wish he associates with home,
As they crawl up the drive of Devereux
Avoiding potholes and wild rhododendrons.
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He’s been at the World Church Headquarters
Outside Geneva for the last few years,
With trips to the think tanks at Cuernavaca,
Simla, Nagasaki, and Nairobi,
And has a reputation as a comer
In Ecotheist policy and theory.
Despite success, he has been miserable;
Depressed, with violent dreams, and sudden urges.
All this his mother knows; she’s found a way
In her true kindness and solicitude
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To cheer him up, her loyal follower.
“Garrison, it’s time you had a wife.
Your work is too important and too hard
To risk a breakdown, as you have been doing.
Your sexual and your parental instincts
Need to be served as well. I think I’ve found
Just the right person for you. Yes, she’s here.
Her name is Bella, she’s a real treasure.
After you’ve met her we will talk again:
The new proposal from the Martian rebels
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About the biocultures that they want
Needs careful handling, or they will loot us
Of our heritage; and I think I see
A way to bring their schism to an end.—
But this is shop talk. Come and meet your girl.”
Bella’s indeed a treasure. She is mild
And pretty and affectionate, a cellist
Whose intelligence is well expressed
In music by a skilful excellence
In the melodic line and the ensemble.
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She is a natural Christian: knows her limits,
Accepts the Parenthood of God, and lives
In the happiness of Another’s will;
And Ecotheist doctrine has enriched
Her sensibility, with intuitions
Of the great poise and harmony of things,
That timeless template of reality
That brackets all vicissitudes of time:
Nature according to eternity.
The score is given by the grand Composer;
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It is for us to best perform the theme.
Garrison almost weeps with kindness for her;
Few could resist that candor and that calm.
He has been places she must never go,
He thinks, and wishes to protect her from
His own acedia, his noonday demons.
He had, when Gaea had proposed her theme,
By an old reflex drawn himself within,
Ready, as one might wince, to take the blow
The spirit schools itself to now endure.
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But this is different; Gaea has once more
Reached over expectations to the heart
Of the problem, and seized it by its tubes.
And Bella’s studied him and loves his grief,
His crucifixion on the axis-points
Of modern history and kinship struggle;
Has even guessed the dreams about the soldiers,
The brotherhood that he can never share.
Her tone with him is purest commonsense,
Mixed with a gentle humor, promising
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Tolerance while it shares, and strength in pain.
She could no more do other than the good
Than a sunflower can turn back from the sun.
“So, Mr. Van Riebeck, what can we do?
She’ll have us married off before we know it.
We must beat her or be resolved to join her;
In either case we’re doomed to be good friends.”
Garrison feels hope flower in his heart,
But it all seems too easy, too arranged.
Or is it his suspicion that is false?
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Perhaps he’s made a habit of misgivings
And ought to take the offerings of God.
But can a gift from Gaea be from God?
What if he took it? Would not this gentle girl
Be made a hostage to his private devils?
Is not this, though, the very sacrifice
She’s formed her life to make? Garrison smiles
Like sun in winter, and at length replies.
“Van Riebecks have a way of eating people,
As you perhaps have heard, Miss Morison.
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To dine with us a long spoon would be wise.
But it is hard to contradict my mother.”
What follow are the happiest days he’s known;
Later that year they’re married, and in autumn
They discover Bella is with child.
At Gaea’s wish they move into the lodge
And in the spring a healthy boy is born;
They name him Flavius for Gaea’s father.
Garrison sees the mother and the child
Asleep together by the Christmas tree;
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And his heart groans, and he does not know why:
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins…
For years Tripitaka has endured
The daily pain and happiness of being
Almost in sweet domestic contact with
The pale-faced icon of his pilgrimage.
Beatrice is his friend, his good friend’s wife,
His wise commander in their common work.
Many a time upon the grotesque mountains
Of the Nilosyrtis, horstblocks upraised
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Between dark grabens littered with debris,
A hand upon the arm has been the saving
Of each other’s life; great groves of forest,
The trees’ growth boosted by a tailored gene
In the unearthly frail gravity,
Have risen from their hands, sigh in the wind.
Beatrice must guess something, but the thought
Disturbs her with its arbitrariness,
Its hint that something might disrupt the joy
Of sailing gently, gently, to old age—
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And in the best possible company.
And Tripitaka simply has avoided
The child Irene, with her strange resemblance
Nobody seems to notice but himself.
So when Irene gravely comes to him
And in correct form kneels and bows to him
As martial arts apprentice to the sensei,
He does not know what to do, and at last,
Because his art enjoins pure certainty,
Refuses. But next day she comes again,
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And next; and at last, mastered by her spirit,
He takes her as his student in the craft.
Irene is sixteen, and at this time
Is like a slender lyre of flesh and blood,
A longbow strung with sensate fire and breath.
She is the finest student he has taught.
Her stance is long and rooted, and her steps
Explode from the hips and stop like a freeze;
Her high kicks are a bright crescent of force,
Her hand-strikes fill a pattern in the air.
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And now she burns with that fresh chemistry
A brave girl can conceive for one she follows,
And still she feels the need for a revenge
For how her teacher hurt her family;
And can that wounded rage at her betrayal
By her brother Wolf, whom she loved so long,
Be slaked and comforted by something else?
Though Sumikami missed it, her Irene
Had learned more of the art of beauty than
Her tutor gave her credit for. This art
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Has been ignored in certain ages, when
An ignorant philosophy reduced
The matter to the brutal act of sex;
Yet cultivated, beauty of the flesh
May form addictions fiercer than a drug,
And human culture’s fairly measured by
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The force of the addictions it survives.
You, my compatriots, whom I address
Anonymously lest my words betray me,
Cannot conceive the sting of Aphrodite.
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Your women are, at their best, healthy beasts;
Your men are lacking in the golden rage
That sets the flush of heaven in their limbs.
But think of Helen and the town she burned,
Of brilliant-shouldered Alcibiades,
Of Cleopatra’s cloak of ibis feathers,
Of Krishna, the blue god, whose gopis touched
With their sweet tongues the white wrists of His Radha
Because she was His favorite in love;
Or Wang Chao-Ch’un the imperial concubine
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Called Water Lily for her purity
Who died by her own hand on the frontier;
Or Philip Sidney and Penelope;
Or Raleigh and his two Elizabeths;
The long-legged courtier of Hilliard;
Or Madame Pompadour, by Fragonard;
Or Garbo, in her perfume and her pearls.
What is there more to say? Can Tripitaka,
Once her net is spread, but walk upon
Its splendid tissue to the bathing-place?
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What might or may the silly lark deny
When the great sparhawk has it in her foot?
For he is yet a virgin, and her art
Is tempered to the frenzied Galahad
In him, the swan-knight of fate and despair,
The monkish warrior of Zen and death.
After she leaves him, he attains that calm
That comes when all recourses are exhausted.
The doctors, fifteen years ago, had said
That his diseases might not be contagious,
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But that he would be sterile all his life.
He cannot offer marriage, and Irene
Has given no permission to disclose
The act that they have shared. What, then,
Can wipe away the stain of his dishonor
And make amends to her for all his crimes?
The shape of the perfection he has sought
So many years, begins now to appear.
He bathes his body, and prepares the garment
And the sword. He robes, and ties the cords
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In the prescribed fashion, and sweeps the floor
Of the small wooden dojo he has built.
He ties his hair back, like a Lohengrin,
And sets the short blade on its lacquered stand
And kneels before it with that concentration
A sword master brings to a tournament.
At the last moment of his meditation
The door is opened quickly by Ganesh.
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 20
