The valved and wallowing baleen, her flukes
Awash with bitter curds of cream, her breath
Thumping like furnace from the pouched blowhole;
The jackdaw in a mob of clever jackdaws,
As exercised as Guelphs or Ghibellines;
The crosseyed skate, who sidled for too long,
The gorgeous flowing camouflaged jaguar,
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The pig with his shrewd eyes, the staring owl,
The lemur retinal, the manatee,
And Mus the mouse and Pan the chimpanzee.
But Charlie and Ganesh had more in mind
Than filling out the plenum of a zoo;
They were composing a community,
A new branch of natural history.
Consider the creation of the swan.
Whether we picture it in space or time
It owes its being to a hierarchy
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Of other organisms. We must learn
To find the beauty in this web of lives,
This seething texture of dependency.
Inside the lungflesh of the leopard frog
That the swan preys on in certain habitats
There lives a nematode which is in turn
Parasitized by zygomycota.
The frogs prey on the ephemoptera
Which feed as larvae on the fungal growth
Of fecal matter from the waterbirds.
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Mites populate the feathers of the swan;
Its colon swarms with microsymbiotes.
Follow the swan’s genes back, and there are branches
Where grebes and petrels, storks and pelicans
Fork outward from the stem, then distant kin,
The swifts and passerines; and further back
The archeopteryxes, and their roots
Which also fed the undreaming monotremes,
The platypus, the anteaters, and so
—Turning a moment to climb up the stem—
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Marsupials, the mammals, and ourselves.
And further down the chordates split again
To tunicates and dim cephalochords;
And now the great branch of the arthropods,
The insects, spiders, and crustacea;
And the mollusca, with their pearly shells
(And such strange creatures as the echiura
Whose tiny male lives as a parasite
Inside the female’s kidney; she is called
The fat innkeeper and is used for bait;
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One of Ganesh’s favorite animals,
The bat ray, pops her from her hole as you
Might clear a toilet with a rubber plunger);
Then down the stem again, where rotifers
And mesozoans branch away; and then
The radiates and formless parazoa:
The sponges in their blind communities.
And down again, to the stromatolites
Which lived two billion years without change;
And then to mineral colonies and clays.
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Sometimes the way down is the way up.
If we could take this path a little further
We’d find those silicates and carbonates
To be compacted ash of burnt-out stars;
The nuclei themselves cooked up inside
The crushing fusion of their white-white cores;
Their particles the frozen motes of light
That burst in nightmare from the primal atom.
And we would know that moment as the fall
Of the Uranian Goddess to Her dream.
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But if we took this way then we might err,
Believing that the arche of the joy
Of all creation as it sings itself
Is found by a retracing of the path
The world took in its long ecstatic fall;
“To thy high requiem become a sod.”
Pass through that point where down is changed to up;
And as the sounding whale breaks for the surface,
And as the vaulter sprints behind his pole,
And as the poet must not yet look back
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Lest the beloved be reclaimed forever,
And as the swan’s wings whoop above the water,
Gold feet spurning the lower element,
Let us turn back toward the holy mountain.
First we must learn to fly. But who will teach us?
Recall the story of the willow-pattern:
A Mandarin engaged the poet Chang
To teach his daughter, beautiful Hong Shee.
Though he was young and poor, they fell in love.
The father in a rage locked up his daughter,
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But she escaped out of a secret gate
Where Chang was waiting, and they fled toward
The little bridge engraved beneath the glaze;
But they were seen, and men with guns pursued;
And Chang was shot and Hong Shee drowned herself.
But the gods changed them to a pair of swallows
And they still dance the lakes and willow-waters.
Wolf and Irene, who learned that planet’s skies,
Will be our flying-teachers so that we
May be as swallows in the air of time.
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It was the children first, of course, who took
The sky, their natural inheritance.
This large land mammal always yearned to fly,
As if the wrong circuitry had got wired
Into a biped quite unsuited to it:
Large boned and dense, “bad power-weight ratio,”
Ganesh liked to point out; and yet nature
(Being fantastical in her conceits,
Not above cruelty, even, if the joke
Seems worth it; or is it incompetence,
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Which governs, after all, ninety percent
Of what goes on anywhere?)—yet nature
Makes us dream of being mighty birds,
Coasting the buttresses of mountain chains,
Lifting away upon a breeze of power,
Escaping monsters, terrors, to the air.
Wolf stands upon a windy hill, his goggles
Pushed up on his head, his grey eyes distant,
A sky-dauphin, like Saint-Exupery:
Let’s listen to him lecture to his students.
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“Your muscles were evolved to bear your body
Against the leaden gravity of Earth.
By now the exercises you have done
Have given you that strength again. On Earth
You could all jump a meter in the air.
Here some of you can leap to twice your height.
Now watch Irene. She weighs forty pounds.
See: she can long-jump over thirteen meters
And her hang-time’s what? Two point eight? Thank you.
That’s enough time, you’ll see, to take two strokes,
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And get a glide you find you can sustain.
You can all press an easy eighty pounds,
Enough to beat the drop rate and the drag.
Then you can get your feet into the stirrups
And make your flying height. A hundred meters
Keeps you out of trouble, and you still
Have depth perception while you feel you need it.
Landing is tough, I know. For those of you
Who really can’t, we’ve got the brained wings,
Which do it for you, ‘drop the flaps,’ we say.
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That means extend and cup the primaries,
Open the secondaries, and stall out
Just as you hit the ground. If you’re afraid,
We’ll start you on the old folk’s muscled wings,
And we can even strap a gasbag on,
Though that’s agai
nst the spirit of the game.”
If you have ears to hear. The metaphor,
This feathered glory I ask you to put on,
Is not intangible, light though it is.
Consider how recursive is its order:
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First, the full wing itself, white as an angel;
Then the wing’s wings, which are its fletch of feathers,
Each with a tuft of warm and gentle down;
But then the feathers too are feathered with
The crispy barbs that clothe the inpithed quill
To form the rigid vane; and these have barbules,
Which again bear hooklets, set to catch
Any chance split and heal it without seam.
(The Sibyl likened wings to our felt time:
She said that underneath the surface structure
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We knew the time of animals and plants,
The time of stones and atoms, and of fire.
So many pens are woven to a pinion,
The prince’s pennon bears his sister’s swan.
Oh fly with it, fly with it, fly with it!)
Wind sifting by, divided by your blade;
Wingtips trailing a curl of turbulence;
Your fingers rule the carpus, metacarpus;
Your masked face feels a burr of parching speed;
A long glide down the aeroclinal wedge
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Into the sudden buoyancy and fetor
That rises from the sweetness of a meadow;
The swift-approaching wavetop of a ridge;
The gasp and fall away into the chasm
That succeeds, the flicking turn along
The cliffwall till the updraft catches you;
The spiral up into the towering sky
As fields and trees diminish like a lens;
The silence as you leave the world of bells,
Cries, stamp and snort of animals, the rush
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And burble of the streams, the sigh of trees;
The sunny blisses of the middle air,
The dizziness of summer afternoons,
The suck and dumbness of the ear’s drawn drum,
The choice of detail from a hemisphere
Of world, all given sharply to the view
Like a crisp plateful of delicious viands,
Like a soft carpet stitched with tiny needles;
The many-colored coat of mortal dwelling.
How do we get down? We should have a kite-string,
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We should have a fishing-line, a reel,
A spool to reel us in, a puppeteer,
A yoke, an apron-string, and we have none!
Ah joy and terror, now we truly know
The meaning and the function of a roof:
It is a lid to keep the sweetness in!
Thus lesson number one, the school of joy.
Without it nothing that was made was made.
Now lesson number two, that certain virtues
Are indescribable by definition,
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And unintelligible, thus inimitable
In the individual. Socrates
Said that we must construct an airy city
If we would so articulate the good
As to make justice worth the defining.
I quote now from the Politics of Chance
The Younger, that book written to preserve
The arguments that led up to the framing
Of the Martian constitution—part
Federalist Papers, part de Tocqueville.
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Imagine then a city made for birds.
First, this cloudcuckooland is made not found.
To make is might and may; mate, machy, maid;
Matrix and mastery, mother and man.
There is no break between “begot” and “made”
For to beget with knowledge is to make
And to make lovingly is to beget.
This but rehearses what the Sibyl says.
Consider next the meaning of a wall.
To us a barrier, but to a bird
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A place to perch and preen its shining wings,
A place to talk and scold, and build its nest.
No property on Mars can be fenced off,
And no one be fenced out. So what is mine
Must be so by consent, not penning in;
Or else a fifth wall must be set above
That starves my property of the rich sun,
The power of growth, the lever of the future.
The energy it costs to lock things up
Is more than that consumed by their remaking.
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Thus property, possession, change their meaning.
They are the sign of neighborhood and trust,
The gratitude of the community;
And money is the counter of that bond.
Further, the valuable changes weight:
Value embodied in material
Cannot be anchored easily, and flies;
Therefore the value’s essence, that’s its form,
The information and its competence,
The inner riches of an education,
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The gift or training of the storyteller,
The layered discipline of expert thought,
The training of the athlete or the mystic,
The power of constant love and memory,
Become the prize, the precious, and the price.
Consider then a new oeconomy
Of spirit and the making of the spirit.
It is a floating world, where wealth is what
Accrues about the things we give away.
Theft is expensive here, a taking on
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Of labor and abstraction, as one might
Burden a well-cut jacket with small change.
They travel light who fly; the millionaire
Carries no money and no credit cards.
Here power is given only to creators,
Who try at once to palm it off on someone;
As in a healthy university
The dons maneuver to avoid the chair.
And that collecting impulse in our genes,
That banker’s genius that dams the current,
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Setting aside a head of capital,
Finds satisfaction only in its potlatch,
Translating matter into obligation
As turbines turn the fluid’s fall to light.
Luck’s lightness here can counter merit’s weight;
Justice burns in the oxygen of mercy
To drive the engines of the free republic.
At first the lightness of the flow of value
Demanded mere originality
In Brownian motion, barren innovation.
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Mars had its brief, silly postmodernism.
Then as the Sibyl spoke the cosmos blazed
With its mysterious, bounded clarity,
Its mutual, guessed, but still intelligible
Working out of its own destiny,
Its evolution as its gods awake
To dream the higher dream of consciousness.
And as the artists worked they found the genres
Rooted in the grey loam of the brain,
Where flows of value knot to branch and bole,
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And difference can make a difference,
And flowering risks a nest egg of tradition;
They found the arts that made the cavemen human
And strained our chromosomes to genius:
The epic melody and sacrifice,
The mask, the rite, the fresco and the song,
The interactive game and the debate,
The drama of the one and chosen act.
So when the dancer turns within her fiction
Of the air, though here her weight is less,
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> Her mass and angular momentum
Speak the same language, standard, copious,
As any of her sisters of the earth.
And when her arms go out, and the spin
Slows to the stopped gift of a white embrace,
Her audience feels that ancient shock of love
And grief, as the brain-liquors hit the heart,
Which moved our ancestors when they saw her
Against the firecast shadows of the cave.
Walls are as weak for persons as for things.
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For Aristophanes the avian city
Was orgiastic as the land of dreams.
The cuckoo’s cuckoldry, the barnfowl’s incest
(As Chanticleer with Pertelote his sister),
The fuckflight of sweet Marvell’s coupled tercels,
Made every place a lover’s rendezvous
And every time the date of assignation.
And for a brief time so it was. This planet
In its virgin loveliness would offer
The choice scenario for scenes of flesh:
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The place where one might, under open sky,
Undo a whiteness or a swarthiness
Marked by the stigmata of generation
To the peeled eyeball-sense of your parched lover;
And a soft foot, cradled in bright green mosses,
Might tug a thigh against a loosening belly.
The learned Aristophanes could fear
The bold invasion of the mother’s bed,
Every man his own blind Oedipus,
The town buried in its cloacal swan.
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But in a garden where no fruit’s forbidden,
Fruit swiftly grows insipid to the taste,
Unless some richer savor, saltier
Or tarter, comes to invest the core.
The self of promiscuity is watery,
The flesh indisciplined can know no pleasure;
The greatest joy is to see your own children
Grow in the house you share with your beloved;
The meat of immortality is this:
Progeny, influence, and fertile death.
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Who mates with many lovers mates with one
Only, the image of your own desire;
Who mates with one mates with a thousand beings,
All the geography of another world,
And then the changes in that world brought forth
By your inhabiting of it, your own
Being inhabited by another world.
The only journey is in faithfulness;
The unfaithful never can escape from home.
What Martian opportunity selected for
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Was inner constancy and truthfulness:
The free bond of the noble citizen
Knowing the work of joy and free to fall.
Like greylag geese, like the trumpeter swan,
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 29