Of matched antagonists, controlled and led
By a fine dance of feedbacks, asymptotic,
Cyclical, damping, even catastrophic.
Let there be forest fires to purge the ridges;
Let there be herbivores to mow the parkland,
And predators to cull their gene pools clean
And viruses to kill the carnivores
That sheep may safely graze. Each form of life
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Shall feed upon the wastes of its convivors;
Let there be beetles and bacteria
And moulds and saprophytes to spin the wheel
Of nitrogen, corals and shells to turn
The great ratcheted cycle of the carbons;
Each biome—grassland, forest, littoral;
Benthic, pelagic; arctic, desert, alp—
Shall keep appointed bounds and yet be free.
Let the new species bud and multiply;
Let monsters speciate and radiate
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And seize the niche that they themselves create;
Let some be smothered or extinguished; some,
Effete, exquisite—the trumpeter swan,
The rare orchid, the monoclone cheetah—
Cling to some microclimate or kind vale,
Eking survival for a clutch of genes.
Beatrice has a wand, a metatron,
To help her in her work; a golden bough
Wherewith she will transmute and charge her world
With metamorphosis: the flowering plants.
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Mars was first seeded with the gymnosperms:
Horsetails, treeferns, cycads, conifers.
Now comes the carnival of angiosperms,
The spirits of a world made up anew
In all the colors that vibrate the field
Of time’s ether, giving a taste to light.
As each seedclone package comes from the shops
Of sleepless Charlie and Ganesh, she breaks
It out among her helpers; Hilly Sharon,
Her pilot, flies her among the green coombs
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And verdant-headed hills and plains of Mars
To supervise the setting of the seeds.
Ganesh has multiplied the speed of growth
Tenfold, relying on the lesser weight
The plant must carry to its destiny;
And soon that glorious, pathetic fate
Bursts in a billion blooms across the planet
In petals bluish, pink and mauve and gold.
Now the first bees, their wise, conformist brains
Not muddled much by the new dispensation,
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Blunder among the anther and the pistil.
Quivering beech-groves, the work of but a year,
Rootle and creak on hillside or in canyon,
Their white feet sunk in a sweet red mould.
From Earth we saw it through our telescopes:
Whole hemispheres turned white with fragrant daisies;
Reefs rising in long chains and rings about
Those windy coasts under a tiny sun.
On Earth the metaphors must be selected
From what is given us, what lies to hand.
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Martian metaphors must be half created:
Their meaning and their medium spring to life
At the same moment, indistinguishable;
There’s no pathetic fallacy on Mars,
For that world is enspirited at birth.
Nevertheless Beatrice makes the choice
To start her strange concerto with the theme
That was the first to clothe her aspiration:
Arcadia. She takes the cratered south
And sets it, in the warmer latitudes,
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With aromatic herbs and oleanders,
Wild grapes, sages, and bougainvilleas
That riot up the sheltered inner slopes
Of craters named Copernicus and Galle,
Slipher, Hipparchus, Kuiper, Ross, and Green,
Lampland, Le Verrier, Helmholtz and Liu Hsin.
Sometimes a still lake fills the shallow cup,
And sometimes craterlets with their own lakes
Form wooded islands in the greater wells.
A gentian sulks among the pungent grasses.
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The windy crater-lips are set with pines
Whose broad crowns never cease to shift and sigh.
Goats graze the hillsides, and the tall falcon
Quarters the depthless acres of the sky.
And in the temperate zones the theme is softer,
Warbl’d upon an oaten flute in autumn,
What time the grey-fly winds her sultry horn
(And ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in west);
The woodland shadows creep across the vale
And Earth, the evening star, gleams on the stream.
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Here the deciduous, the bountiful
Of sacrificial leaves, that shake and scorch
In fevers at the year’s chilly ending
And drop their heavy garment like the flesh
Of saints or martyrs, here the sycamore,
The oak, the arched elm and the poplar
Tower about the glades, the noblest trees,
And blossom in the spring gigantically,
Reckoning bloom by tons, by the ten thousands.
And on the hillsides the wild rose in fall,
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The crocus and the daffodil, that flower
From their giant Martian corms and bulbs
Twice, even thrice in this eternal spring.
The variations of Arcadia
Branch out like palm-sprays from the parent stem:
The classical, heroic, and grotesque,
The meditative and the modernist.
Beatrice plants the fossae, those straight trenches
In the surface, whose high walls arrow down
In curved perspective to the close horizon,
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With formal cedars and with lakes and lawns:
Tempe, Mareotis, Alba, Elysium.
Above the fosse hovers a purple sky
Filled with a wind that does not blow below.
Canals, in honor of the ancient fiction,
Are dug along the axis of the rift.
The dark tobacco-smell of sunwarmed box
Dazes the wanderer in these parterres;
A fountain clatters at a vanishing point.
All is in classical humane proportion.
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And the Islamic gardens of the Taj
And those Khmer quadrangles of tropic flowers,
Those stone arcades of tantric statuary
Are pressed for metaphor and simile.
She saves the heroic mode for certain places
Where Mars, like a young actor full of talent,
Offers a tragic gift, wild and untrained:
The Valles Marineris, and the craters
Of the Tharsis Ridge, three grand calderas;
Olympus Mons upon its pedestal
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Of basalt and obsidian, ten miles high;
Certain new seacoasts, whose amazing cliffs
Jar the mind’s eye with desperate fantasies;
The polar caps, with their gigantic wastes,
Scalloped crevasses, and blind nunataks.
Here she leaves much alone; and her esthetic
Follows the puritan iconoclasm
Of the American parks and wildernesses.
Sometimes she has a giant or a horse
Etched on a hillside like a Nazca god
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Or neolithic Wessex henge-maker;
Sometimes Promethean disfigurements,
The huge machines of planoforming, or
The technologies of the robot mines,
Can give the crowning shiver to a valley
&
nbsp; Cragged with the terror of the shadow of death.
But much is left to chance and to the weather.
Ganesh’s biotech is everywhere,
Balanced by Charlie’s crisp ecology.
Beatrice likes the powdery mushroom-groves,
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Their dusky fins, smooth caps and flanged white shafts,
That smell of spores and collapse heavily
If you but set a shoulder to the trunk.
She plants them by the moist grots and caves
And varies them with scarlet agarics,
Boletes and chanterelles. For the grotesque
She has besides the swampland with its mangroves,
Bottle- and screw-pines, and the littorals;
And then there are the subterranean lakes,
Still as the face of death, and black as ink,
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Where bellowing magma-reservoirs once spewed
Their white slags reddening into the air.
Sometimes her sculptors, tired heavy men
And sweaty grinning girls with laser chisels
Will leave a trunked Ganesha by a cave
Or a tall totem in a forest grove,
Or a silenus ithyphallic where
A spring breaks through the mosses of a cliff.
The very giantism of the trees
Released from Earthly gravity, can give
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The comic scale to landscapes of the sun.
The human towns are built of living trees,
That grow their creaking vaults and sinewy beams;
They smell of sunlight, bark, and crystal resins
Like Adirondack lodges years ago.
(The public buildings though are made of stone,
Handsome, porous, ranging in tone from fawn
And golden to dark brown and maroon;
Their classical facades and fitted ashlars
Meet for the canons of the new republic.)
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And there are landscapes made for meditation
Where mists blow between crags scarcely less airy
Than the vapors they divide; where the pines
Bonsai’ed to knotted dwarfs, yet fledged with pins,
Make groups so subtly asymmetrical
The mind’s made docile to a still amazement
And its each stroke of thought’s as natural
As leaves a bamboo brushstroke leaves behind.
The white strings of the waterfalls make chords
As hoarse and endless as the breath of time,
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And halfway up the mountain there’s a hut
Where a small scholar feeds his poem with wine.
And then there are the rhapsodies in blue,
The landscapes of the jazz age, the new world.
The Martian airports, with their lettering
Of flanged silver like the Emerald City
Look out from lounges, where you sip a cocktail,
On sunlit hills with round trees in their clefts.
You take a streamlined monorail as neat
As was the California Zephyr in its prime
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Through a dramatic evening scene of cloud
And silver-shine suspension bridge to towns
Whose transit stations and whose trocaderos
Are lit and pink with parabolic neon.
Seaside resorts are smart with small hotels,
Striped canopies, and staircases and pools
In a Miami Art Deco pastiche,
With bronze door-lintels like the Empire State,
And ocean-scenes of palms and pink flamingos
And blues as frail and pale as frosted glass,
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Dimmed lamps and the sound of saxophones.
At night, sidereal archipelagoes,
Lunules électriques, cieux ultramarins.
On ne regrette les anciens parapets.
Each of these gardens now awaits its story;
Its genius loci clasps its fetal hands.
Since all material is but arrangement
Each new arrangement’s new material.
Feel now the great Swan’s wing Beatrice weaves
To clothe the arms of Mars; the pelt of life
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That makes a purpose from a purple dress.
Act V
The Words of the Sibyl
The poem now turns to the childhood of the Sibyl. The Sibyl is the first source of the revelation special and proper to Mars, as the sayings of Isaiah, Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed, Lao Tse and the others were revelations proper to the Earth. Irene, learning that she herself is the mother of the Sibyl, attempts in rage against her stepmother Beatrice to destroy herself. The Sibyl restores her miraculously to life. The poem now records the Sibyl’s words about gods, time, and the origin of things.
Scene i:
The Sibyl’s Awakening
If my words are unworthy, let them die,
Let them be burnt and the voice too that speaks them.
What should the voice care, if it had been given
The casket and the stones, and the precious moment
When they may be spoken, and then misread them,
Interpreted a shallow or obscured thing?
Even to touch the ghost of such a chance
Is blessing, paradise beyond all curses.
Even the fake partakes of such a fullness,
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Given the nature of the original,
That it could scarcely be content with any
Ordinary proof or genuine.
If this should be the threshold of the god,
Who is the world at last come to awareness
Of itself, of its superlation of
Itself, its sweet incipience forever
Now to step into its natural home,
And yet its always being on the verge
Of what adventure will betide soever;
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If that god should be sister to mankind,
Most dear sister, Urania, Sophia,
Sister of Christ, Radha among her gopis,
The long promised and veiled Shekinah,
The bride of Life come from her long mourning,
Her long incomprehension of herself,
Into the torches of the marriage chamber;
If this were such a threshold, who would not
Gladly and joyfully be turned away,
The doors locked on him, cast into the darkness,
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Having once had his hand upon the latch,
Having but smelt the spirit of the feast?
How might one know the touch of such a truth?
Surely at least by its surprises. This
Is the book of Hermione the Sibyl,
Who was as we have seen a pretty child,
And who’d expect the pretty to be so
Heart-cordial to the body of the world?
Now in her eighties, but still full of grace,
The geisha Sumikami nursed the child;
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And what the mother would not take of her,
The art of beauty, now the daughter learned.
They say she would walk barefoot in the snow
As Heian ladies did, to kill the skin
And leave the feet as soft as herons’ down;
Her flesh was white as milk; her lips, her teats,
And certain other parts, were red as blood.
She early learned to dance and then to sing;
Her voice, they say, was of all voices ever
In the world, the loveliest: it held
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Shell within shell, all timbres that have rung
The tympan of the air since time began:
The purity of the simple crystalline,
Aeolian tremors of the questing wind,
The fluted overtones of calling birds,
The sweet hoarse naivety of the beasts,
The noble c
lose intent of human speech,
Frank shy intelligence of consciousness,
And something still angelic, like an eye
Winged, with wet lashes, come to comfort us.
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That voice would make you tremble into love,
And yet you could not touch it, hug it to you,
As you might a body; as you would desire.
This beauty was not vainness, but a gift,
As one might, with a flush, and look away,
Give to another a great armful of flowers,
Smelling so fresh that you were faint with grief.
That beauty was a living fairy tale,
A stroke of precious and unearned luck.
They say Hermione as a little child
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Would play amid the strange white loom of fibers,
The chrysalis of optic filaments
That linked the great computers of the planet;
And then Ganesh taught her the interfaces
Whereby the cybernetic impulse might
Innerve the penetralia of the brain;
And as organic wetware came on line,
Evolved by software planted with a drive
To pattern and intelligence, she drew
Draughts of fresh knowledge from this clear spring;
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And when she tired she slept and dreamed the world
And woke to love from everyone about her.
She was a learned lady then, a bluestocking;
Imagine her discourse at eight years old
Of Pseudo-Dionysius and Berenice,
Of Mithras and of Hermes Trismegistos,
Of Tiamat and of the Empress Wu,
Of the Lao-Tsu Goddess, whose river-body
Is the world, and of the wise Shamankas,
Of the sea-born Saint Mary of Egypt,
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And of Yao Chi the turquoise courtesan;
Or of before the fortieth negative power
Of the first second of the universe
When none of the four forces yet had branched
To paint the screen of physicality;
Or of the limbic passages of dream
Whereby the structure of the brain is formed;
Or of the disciplines of dance and breath
Whereby the soul may penetrate the flesh;
Or of the divinations and the sortes,
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The yarrow-stems, the singing of the signs.
Her mistresses were those medieval ladies
Who carried the long secret of the Sibyls
On into times when it might spring again:
The scholar-queen of the Heptameron,
Christine de Pisan, Marie de Champagne,
Margery Kemp and mystical Julian,
Elizabeth the Duchess of Urbino,
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 27