Of history, and left a ringwalled sea—
These were a Mars to the exploring Greeks,
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Who set their cities on a seaward hill,
Paestum or Cumae, and who there dug caves
To house their holy women and their shrines
And sowed the place with myths and oracles.
A crater is a dish of sacrifice.
Heroes must track drowned sailors underground,
Baios, Misenus, or sad Palinurus,
And learn the bellowing gnosis of the caves.
So they may build a moment’s heaven in hell,
And mark the future with the stamp of being.
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And where the three caves meet within her dream,
The engineering of the scientist,
The Sibyl’s riding by incipient gods,
The new dimension of this very time
She stands at on the darkling shore of Mars
Are knotted in the buckle of her vision.
As when the careful archeologist
Scratches away the tufa, ash, and glass
From some Pompeian villa, to reveal
An airy atrium, a bath and fountain,
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A cryptoportico, a peristyle;
And then the crusted walls are brushed and cleaned,
Where glows a fresco, on a ground of red,
With graceful figures, priestesses and bride,
Passing through mysteries where they may share
The hot and frenzied nuptials of the god,
That Dionysos who drew back the veil
From Ariadne’s dolorous corpse, and called
Her forth from Hades-land that she might share
The feast-time of the gods; so Beatrice
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Wipes off the dust of grief from her bright vision
And knows with quickened pulse its patterned theme.
It is a matter very practical:
The gardening of crater planetscapes.
Few books record its arts and its techniques;
Yet Cicero’s landscape gardeners would know,
When they laid out his grounds by Lake Lucrino,
And the patricians of the Alban Hills,
Who set their villas by the crater-lakes
Of Nemi and Albano clad in vines
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And let their grottos give a prospect on
A glimmering water, framed in shady pines—
They’d be worth asking, if she might invoke
Their gentle, haughty shades for such discourse;
Yet they passed on their wisdom, as the Greeks
Did to the Romans, and the Romans to
The masters of the Renaissance; they taught
The gardeners of England how to shape
A sylvan walk to imitate the trials
Of Hercules or sharp Odysseus,
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Instruct a guest-Aeneas how to choose
The way of piety and fortitude.
And they, in turn, taught the Americans:
The gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, and those
The DuPonts planted outside Wilmington,
Carried the same hermetic wisdom on
Across the oceans, and the garden-worlds
That glitter in a necklace round the sun
Bear the same history, the land of shades
Transformed to paradise, to fairyland,
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To purify the dreaming of the tribe.
It seems that Beatrice must write the book,
Though, and reveal its secret name as Mars.
At last now the survivors of the war
Have made their rendezvous at Phobos base
And will descend to planetfall tomorrow:
Hilly and the remnants of the escort;
Ganesh, more somber now; the Martian folk
Whom Gaea has permitted to depart
To seek the desert of their promised land;
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Wolf and Irene, whose fast ship caught up
With Hilly’s limping squadron; and the rest.
Despite the poverty of Mars, a ritual
Has been prepared to mark the victory
And mourn and memorize the grievous loss.
On that brief hillside in the Nilosyrtis
Where it was Tripitaka’s pleasure once
To walk and look upon the promontories
Of the young planet, they have built an ark
Of polished basalt, and inscribed the names
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Of all those who have died in the Ark War.
The ark is bobbin-shaped, like that brave ship
Whose monument it is, Kalevala.
A copy of the Codex has been made
Which is to be entombed within the urn,
While those who came there sing the grand old hymn
That prays for those in peril on the sea.
The ritual’s broken by Hillel Sharon
Who casts himself against the cold black stone
And shrieks his grief and rage for those he lost,
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Ximene and Marisol, who cheated him,
Who gave their sweet love for the promised land.
But Beatrice lifts him up, and kisses him,
And speaks to him before the people there:
“You are my servant now from this time forth.
The work has been revealed. We have been called
To plant a garden in the promised land,
And you shall be the hand by which it’s done.”
And Hilly sees her face and worships her
As Tripitaka did once, long ago,
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And dries his tears, and swears his service to her.
The ritual resumes, but seeing this,
Ganesh and Charlie meet each other’s glance,
And the old light of sheer outrageousness
That used to cross between them in the days
They worked in Novus Ordo, in the mist
And crazy sunlight of St. Francis’ town
Comes back to both their eyes. If Bea is hot,
If the old firm can get its mojo working,
If Hilly with his charm and energy
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Is now aboard, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
And so a ritual can change a mood
And crack the blank white egg-mask of the future.
Next day the new Pandora’s box is opened up,
The Codex with its boiling stew of life.
A week later the first organic forms
From the new source are cast into the sky:
Aerial zooplanktons, planned for years.
Everyone battens down and waits. This will,
If Charlie’s calculations are correct,
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Be something moderately spectacular.
For some days nothing happens; then the sky
Seems to turn yellowish like the vault of heaven
In old Pekin, stained with a rich dust
Of fine loess blown from the polar icecaps
Many ten thousand years ago; this dust
Is new and is undoubtedly alive.
Then it gets very hot, and thunderstorms,
With their mad boom and crackle here on Mars
Roil through the heavy air. And now at last
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All hell breaks loose. The Hadley cells break up,
The jetstreams double, buckle, dissipate;
A worldwide hurricane sets in, and blows
As tirelessly as Jupiter’s red spot;
Forests lie shattered, and the upper air
Bursts into flame as the sweet volatiles,
Those poisons to the higher forms of life,
Are oxidized and cracked, and fall as rain,
To fertilize the body of the planet.
“Hold onto your hats,” Ganesh reassures
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Over the landwire p
ublic service link;
“This will be over in just forty days.”
And so it is. The miracle’s accomplished.
The colonists, come blinking from their caves,
Trembling and sick because of their long habit,
Slowly take off their breathing masks and breathe.
How may I speak the new air of a planet?
Bitter and edged with the volcanic ash,
The clean electric taste of mountain water,
A trace of rust, of carbon, breathing trees;
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Yet sweet, embarrassing, like mother’s milk.
The gardening of Mars begins.
Scene v:
The Garden
But now the story starts to choke and fade,
As throttled by the thinness of the breath
That passed for many years between the planets.
Just at the moment Mars began to breathe,
Its conversation and its intercourse
With mother earth was crimped into a gasp
As an umbilicus is tied before
The cutting-off that gives us two for one.
For some time Charlie’s scientific colleagues
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(If they were not suppressed) still kept in touch
By pirate relays on the satellites;
There was the leashed press of the Ecotheists,
The diplomatic pouch; but gradually
My direct sources narrow down to two:
Old Giamba Vico, and his bright assistant,
Who kept recordings of the firm’s affairs.
Then Giamba was placed under house arrest,
And shortly after, died. From this point on
I must rely on myth, official sources,
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Rumor, hearsay, later recollection;
Until the strange new word began to flow
Between the barriers and over the wall.
Since then I have obtained the garden notebook
Beatrice kept in those dark years of toil:
And this, and the darker Voice of the muse
Sustains me in these desert passages
That are the antechamber of the light.
It was about this time, then, that the paths,
The runnels of that probability fluid
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That form the branching net or tree of Time
Began to bifurcate and twin, till Earth
And Mars had made their bleeding parturition,
And each could resonate, freed of the other,
As its own self-fated string might reconcile.
One was the live branch of the flowering Jesse;
One was the dead stick of the elder law.
And yet; can it be that freedom, for to grow
Has need of both?—that the Old Year, His jaw
So crooked, gnawing on the fertile ear
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Of Spring, serves as the pruning shear, the dock
From which the golden prisoner bursts clear?
But then I the poet, who ride on his shoulder,
The old man’s, I mean, into the sad shade,
Must I endure the terror of his glide,
The terror of his comfortable, mild,
Reasonable fading and decay?,
Of his forgetfulness of ever light,
Of ever bright rain raining on the field
Of joy and grief, of the obtaining act?
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Better to cast myself between the shears,
To try to call the old night-wanderer back.
Sing, then, sweet bride-ghost, mother-mariner,
Of the garden planted in the vales of Mars;
How Beatrice bled the themes into each other
Of native waywardness and Arcady.
First, though, let us recall how it had been
Before the helmed conquistadors had come;
What lay below the gold wings of the ship
That bore the speechless astronauts to ground.
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A numb plain spread with stones. A weary steppe
All bleached to tired red with ultraviolet.
Soil crusted, sere; limonite, siderite.
Hard radiation in a waste of cold.
Rocks sucked dry by the near vacuum.
Stunned with the blank math of the albedo
The eye tries to make order of it, fails.
Whatever’s here once fell from someplace else.
Sometimes a crag a foot high, or a mile;
Always the sagging tables of the craters,
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The precise record of a mere collision.
And yet a stunted and abortive chemistry,
A backward travesty of life, proceeds:
Parched cirrus clouds move over the ejecta;
A hoarfrost forms upon the shadow sides;
Dark patches colonize the regolith;
Sometimes with a thin violence a sandstorm
Briefly makes shrieks of sound between the stones;
Rasps off their waists and edges, and falls silent.
Time here is cheap. A billion years can pass
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Almost without a marker; if you bought
A century of Marstime in the scrip
And currency of Earth, you’d pay an hour
Or half an hour of cashable event.
It’s really a young planet then, a bald
And mild mongoloid, a poor old cretin
Worth but a handful of Earth’s golden summers.
And it was beautiful. Those who first walked there
Said it was fresh as the true feel of death,
As Kyoto earthen teaware, as the Outback;
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As clean as is geometry, as bones.
To spoil this archetype, this innocence,
Was to incur a guilt whose only ease
Was beauty overwhelming to the loss,
Was a millennial drunkenness of life
That might forget its crime in ecstasy.
But it was not enough to reenact
The long sensualities of mother Earth,
To take on trust the roots of history;
They must be minatory, and exact
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A last accounting of the failed balance
All the intestate dowager had left.
There must be new assumptions in the matrix,
New ratios, dimensions and arrays;
Beatrice finds her trope in simple mass,
The crazy lightness of all things here
Set, in a poetry that brewed delight,
Against the literal dimness of the light.
After the riot, then, of Earth diseases,
After mycosis, cometfall, the plague
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And infestation of the weeds, the jungles
Of a lifeforce as fresh as it was vulgar,
The time came to prune and shape the flow.
On Mars all these fall slowly, dreamily:
Waterfalls, billowy, like the clawed waves
In Hokusai prints of sudden storms.
Snow, in soft bales or volumes, scarcely more
Than bright concatenations of a vapor.
Rain, in fine drizzles, dropping by a cliff
Stained by the rocksprings and the clinging mosses.
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Rivers and streams, whose wayward pressures thrust
More, by inertia, at their banks than beds,
And so can spread in braided flats and strands
To glittery sallow-marshes, quiet fens.
Ocean waves, swashy, horned, and globular,
Like the wave-scenery of an antique play,
(Bright blue horned friezes worked to and fro,
A fat-lipped leviathan, and a ship).
And then on Mars all these rise swifter, easier:
Smoke, which makes mushrooms in the wildest air.
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Fountains, which tower and tower, whose very
fall
Is caught up once again within the column
Of their slow and weighty rise; yes, fountains
Shall be the glory of our Martian gardens.
Flames, in like fashion, scarcely dance on Mars
So much as dart into the air, like spirits
Lately penned in earth but now set free.
And the warmed thermal plumes from open fields
Of ripened grass or stubble here make clouds
As tall as chefs’ hats, stovepipes full of thunder.
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The poets of the Earth refine the fuel–
The hot benzene of value culture burns
To power its subtle engines of desire—
From fossil liquors buried in the stone
Through ages of creation and decay.
They can afford to toss aside the raw,
And take for granted a world cooked and rich
With ancient custom, languages numberless
As layers of autumn leaves within the forest,
Nature itself grown conscious, turned upon
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Itself to make its rings so intricate,
History fertile with its own grave-mould.
And so the poets’ work is little more
Than cracking out the spirit they inherit
In the tall silver towers of poetry
To brew those essences, those volatiles,
Those aromatic esters, metaphor,
Image, trope and fugitive allusion.
Prodigals, they burn half that they use
To purify the rest; and they make little,
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Only a froth or lace of ornament.
The poets of Mars must brew the very stuff
The Earth-poets burn as waste; must mate each word
With breeder’s care, and dust the yellow pollen
Over the chosen stamen; graft the stem
To coarser stock, and train the line to sprout
Productive variation years ahead.
The poets of Mars must make the myths from scratch,
Invent the tunes, the jokes, the references;
They must be athletes of the dream, masters
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Of the technology of inventive sleep,
Architects of the essential shades of mood.
What they inherit from the Earth, they earn,
Through sacrifice and trouble, and they breed
More than they are bequeathed. So Beatrice,
Taking into her hands her garden tools—
A dream of a Campanian burial,
A trope of lightness, and a wild new world—
Begins the cultivation of the void.
This garden: let it propagate itself,
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Sustain itself, an arch-oeconomy
Dynamically balanced by the pull
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 26