Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars
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Perhaps with his sun sets the sun of war,
Of all that cruelty and blind endeavor.
But if his act concludes a greater work,
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That work began in an Arcadian dawn
When he incurred the debt he’s now discharged;
And if there is a lesser work whose cycle
Now fully comes around to meet the greater,
It was that interrupted ritual
Of death, begun upon the fighting-floor
To celebrate the end of maidenhood.
Exhausted, flushed, Irene cannot sleep.
The ghastly freedom of their late decision
Has left her breathless, without rules or comfort,
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Exhilarated, almost perhaps insane.
At last she creeps into her brother’s room
And lies down with him in his bed, and shivers.
Slowly he wakes, perceives what he’s not felt
Since childhood, the bed-flesh of his own twin.
He turns, limed in the lawlessness of sleep,
And catches her within his heavy arms.
But now a chill comes over her, the thought
Of what it is that they must do tomorrow;
She pushes from him, whispers tenderly
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As if a bride upon the eve of marriage:
“No. Not yet. Not till the thing is done.”
Ximene and Marisol upon the bridge
Have used the time that Tripitaka gave them
With his brief theater, to change the orders
Fed to the great computer at the Arkship’s heart.
As the first troops arrive, they close the circuits;
Mother and daughter, closer now than ever
In their lives, clasp each other breast to breast,
Woman to woman; and the wretched lover
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That they have shared is all forgiven now.
The energies that drove this ship are turned
Obediently into themselves, and so
A new sun momently is born in heaven
Too bright to look upon, that has licked clean
The battlefield of victors and of vanquished,
Fading at once to leave a field of stars.
The operations room at Devereux
Falls to a hush as the war-screens go dead.
Gaea’s the first to break the silence. “So,
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Friends and comrades, we have won. As we knew,
They had the power to undo themselves.
May we invite you, Mr. Commissioner,
To stay with us tonight and take what rest
The brief time still affords before the dawn?”
But Garrison feels a dull aching grief:
In that white flash he lost his only friend.
“Tomorrow evening we must meet again,”
Says Anderssen, his white eyebrows drawn down;
“We face the issue of the refugees.
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Should we intern the rebels we have here
Or send them back to Mars if they desire?
Dear friend of the Church, we thank you again,
And will accept your gracious invitation.
We leave for London next morning early;
We shall expect to see you there tomorrow.”
At noon next day Wolf and Irene cross
The tangled grounds of Devereux unobserved.
They peer into the windows of the place.
Almost at once they see their grandmother.
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She is alone, but for the little boy,
Flavius, who runs to her with open arms,
Over and over, giving gurgling shrieks
Of happiness; she hugs his body hard
And lets him go again. Wolf and Irene
Look one another in the eyes, and both
Are full of tears. This thing cannot be done.
They know at last they never will be lovers.
That night at her son’s plea Gaea agrees
To let the Martian hostages go home.
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Among them are the twins, with the great Codex.
Beatrice gives birth to Hermione, later known as the Sibyl, genetic daughter of her niece Irene and Tripitaka. In her grief at the loss of her friends with the arkship, she falls into a deep despondency. Chance the younger and Sumikami nurse the child. Beatrice is comforted by a dream of the mysteries of Cumae, and inspired by the crater landscape of the Bay of Naples in her dream, she takes up her child again and remembers her vocation to be the gardener of Mars. She recruits the grieving Hillel Sharon to the work; the Codex is opened and the first of its living contents are regenerated. At last the air of Mars is ready to be breathed by human lungs.
Scene iv:
The Birth of the Sibyl
In very complex systems resonance
Can make a music of their feedback loops;
Time, then, becomes coherent like the cells
That roll in little scrolls within the body
Of a pan of boiling water, or
A gas-giant’s methane envelope; or like
The light that pulses from an argon laser.
Consider this: the very moment when
The arkship died, Beatrice screamed in pain
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And drove between her thighs the crowning dark
Of one who came to sing the universe
Into its new time of most joyful gods.
And so the father dies into his daughter.
They named the child Hermione, and since
No surname seemed to serve, they made one: Mars.
In later times she would be known as Sibyl.
These lips unworthy that do speak her name.
The birth was hard and long; the elder mother
In the stretched prodigality of love
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Would not rest even when she was delivered,
But took the baby to herself and sang
To it, and shared it with the worried Charlie,
And asked for the boy Chance, who came and held
The baby girl; all this while doctors worked
To stop the bleeding, and her face, a moon,
Waned with the shadows of her weariness.
Doctor Perez at last must fight with her,
Drive people out, give her a sedative.
And no one told her of the news, the loss
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Of the Kalevala, the death of friends,
The fall of the first warlord of Mars.
And then when she awakes she is depleted
Both of her blood and spirit; she feels cold,
But when her other doctor, Katya Grishin,
Takes her temperature, she’s got a fever.
Worse, when the cheerful day-boy brings the papers,
He’s not been told to keep them from this patient;
She reads in the Syrtis Intelligencer
Of the last bloody moments of the war,
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And how the father of her child had died.
And now the weariness of all things human
Comes on her as it came on Charlie once
When all the golden narrative seemed just
A sitting on a stone in a dark place.
And it stabs her heart, the dry homesickness,
The artificiality of this,
Their plastic life on a defiled planet;
Where is the natural place, the little valley
With the ancient stream, where Man has not
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With his machines and tendencies, his eye
Cocked for the notice of a chance admirer,
Massaged the rich sweet land into a message?
Where is that sound of water trickling
Over the stones which lay a million years
Until the stream uncovered them again?
Where is the sound of tearing grass you hear
; Across the clearing in the morning mist
Where deer, like tired dancers, catch the sun
Dim gold, upon their brown flanks wet with dew?
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What is this child not her child doing here
With her, in this room under ground, where hide
The remnant of a people drunk with pride
Who at fantastic cost and stress have come
To where they are not wanted, not at home?
The weeks that follow bring a swift decline
In Beatrice’s health and strength of mind.
Doctors Perez and Grishin diagnose
And quickly treat the puerperal fever, but
The deep depression cannot be controlled.
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Charlie and Chance, in tears, hold her limp body,
And try to turn her distant face to theirs;
Sometimes the baby cries and she won’t listen,
Caught in the trance, almost voluptuous,
Of dim, incurious, paralyzed despair.
Charlie at last is almost mad with grief;
The boy takes up the care and nourishment
Of this his niece and sister, heats her milk
When Beatrice cannot give her the breast;
And changes her, despite his boyish loathing
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Of messes smelly, mixed, and living-warm.
And meanwhile Sumikami mourns her son.
The cruelest is, she cannot have his body
That she might wind it in her arms once more
Before committing it to the great flame
Of life, whose truth burns on behind the veils
Of sweet illusion that it generates;
There is no consummation to desire,
No rending of the membrane of attachment.
She prays to the lord Buddha, but in vain;
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As if she were an unrequited lover
She yearns and yearns for what she cannot name.
And the Van Riebecks, in their own distraction,
Leave her to her grief. The first, kindest thought
Is easiest; respect the suffering,
Do not intrude, do not disturb the soul
Of one who is an equal human being,
And therefore capable of her distress.
But in his insight Chance has second thoughts.
Having a thing to care for, he has borne
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Better than most the grief of lonely times.
What can he give her that will spring the trap
The mind makes for itself, and set her free?
One day he takes his sleeping baby sister
And, though he feels the tears scald in his nose,
He lays her in his ancient nurse’s arms.
“Nanna,” he lies, “I can’t look after her
All by myself. Mother is sick, and Dad
Must see to her. We need your help again.”
And now he tells her of the baby’s birth,
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Breaking the promise of his secrecy;
It is her own granddaughter that she holds,
The unknown flesh-gift of her vanished son.
The boy is wise; for, from that moment on,
The nurse’s care eases the care of grief.
So the sweet trap of life, baited with love,
May trap the soul’s own trap, and let it go.
And then one day the weather seems to change,
As even indoors it may, and Beatrice
Remembers as an echo something strange
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That Charlie said, about the Lima Codex;
She asks her doctor Katerina Grishin
If she may walk out in the open air.
Beatrice sees the mountains of the Syrtis
Under the brooding clouds of early spring,
With flecks of white snow in their crevices,
And drizzling rain in flaws and floating drifts.
The ocean in this light shows its own color,
A rich wine red, deep and transparent
(Though in a glass it scarcely hints of rose),
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For here the ferrous oxides set the theme.
How may I tell the strangeness of this place?
Each time the poet passes on it, he
Leaves words, words, leaves, a vesture woven long
Before upon the whispering looms of Earth,
And forests with a growth as meaningless
As beard upon the body of a child
This otherness, this tedious cipherhood.
She feels the cold wind blow upon her body,
And sees it cross the fields of mutant rye,
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Arranged in clumsy rectangles and squares.
She pities the uncaring ugliness
Of these poor plots set out by tired people,
Hardscrabble agriculture in the hills,
Which, she can see, cannot but breed a race
Of ignorant prejudice, strange to grace.
And yet all lands upon the earth were once
A markless wilderness, a sky-struck plain;
And in the valor of their loving labor
Our ancestors inscribed them with their names.
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The riddle and the paradox of action—
How the unacted thing is dead and dull
Until the actor steps into the part,
Then retroactively attains a life
And freedom in the sacrifice of action
That almost make us miss the uncommitted—
Catches her quick mind, will not let it go.
Now she remembers her part as a mother,
And goes to Sumikami, takes the child
Hermione and looks into her eyes,
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And settles down with her and gives her suck.
The grip and nuzzle of the nursing girl,
The soft mouth-liquor and the tug
Of trust turn up the layers of her soul;
The fine down on her body rises up;
Her hair crackles with a wave like fear,
Like tickling, like unexpected joy—
Pit of the stomach ache and pang of love
Upon the very precipice of being,
Drugged with the warm narcosis of the whole.
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This is the loveliest child she’s ever seen.
The hair is black and curly, and so soft;
The skin is white as cream, as ivory;
The face a little buddha’s, slim and calm;
The lips composed into omniscience.
And now the sleep that Beatrice sleeps is fresh
And quenching, as no sleep of hers has been
For many weeks; and she’s blessed with a dream.
It’s like that other dream of piercing blue;
And, as the memory of one dream may
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Seep through the veil into another’s colors,
So this one has the catch and sob of that.
Images from her Italienreise:
She’s with a group of people, not sure whom;
She knows them all. They have come here to Cumae
Where the dead town looks on a lonely sea;
A sacred olive grove whose silver shade
Is heartless as the dazzling grey light
That pours from every part of the blue sky;
A black she-dog haunts the acropolis;
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Afternoon silence; promontories
In the distance, Misenum, sun-baked Baiae.
They pass into a cavern full of air
And light, shadowless swallows twittering.
A smell of something cooking, some burnt grain,
The cold odor of subterranean stone.
Here three caves meet: first, the Sibyl’s shaft,
That passage to the ovaries of the brain.
Next, passing under it aslant and through,
&nb
sp; The work of the heroic engineer,
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Roman Cocceius, who conceived and built,
Driving ten thousand slaves, a ship canal
Through uncracked stone a mile into the land
Where it delivered to the Birdless Lake
The Roman fleet in times of naval war.
And last, another cave whose angle she
Cannot make orient in her mind, which seems
To cross athwart the others, and to rise
Into a depth more terrifying still,
As if a vertigo attends the sky,
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As if the living stone were thin as air.
Some passion with no name: accomplishment
Perhaps?—but not quite present, round a corner—
Forces the tears between her waking lids.
She sees her way. There never was a land
But oracles and artists, or wise queens,
Or free farmers with thumbed books in their shelves,
Or potentates with some enlarging vision
(However cruel their conquests or their rule),
Must mulch its soil with myth and buried sign
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If the humane and intricate would grow.
A land void of inscription, storyless,
Must suffer the departure of its youth,
The wearing out of men until their balls
Are all they know of value; desperate wives,
Who hate their lives, their paltry husbands, and
Their children most of all who hang on them;
And though on Earth the millions may take suck
Upon the accrued seedjuice of the past,
For generations, taking what was given
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By the magnanimous and by the holy
In prodigality and pride and service;
Yet here the soil is thin and must be fattened
With gifts of tongues and visionary blood.
What may be done with this the orphaned land,
This lunar rawness, with its swamps and craters,
Its smeared landslips, and its vermilion sea?
Such, then, must be the meaning of the dream:
The Campi Flegrei, the fields of Hades,
Where Solfatara steams with smells of brimstone
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And the gaunt bony imagined dead below
Beat on the underside of the domed ground,
And the sere grass gives way to greenish sulphur;
The doom-canted ash cone of Vesuvius,
The sad still crater-lake, Virgil’s Avernus,
Dante’s and Homer’s regions of dim sorrow,
The great caldera of the Bay of Naples,
Whose monstrous cone blew off before the age