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Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

Page 13

by Frederick Turner

350

  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

  10

  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.

  20

  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.

  40

  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.

  50

  “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

  150

  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.

  170

  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,

  180

  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.

  230

  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.

  250

  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.

  270

  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.

 

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