Kim Robinson - The Martians

Shards of painted glass. Memory
Speaks in a language
You no longer understand.
The future you understand too well.
Pain in the knee, prescient
Sighs from the wife,
From the boys in their room—
With redoubled effort, sleep, sleep!

I remember during my year in Boston
I was walking alone at sunset by the Charles
The riverbank all covered with snow
The trees black spikes against the sky
The river’s surface a glossy sheen

Cold hand thrust into down jacket pocket
I felt a book I had left behind
Title forgotten just a book any book
But suddenly all I saw was joy

The passage when each section
of the choir begins to sing
a different song and the orchestra echoes
these parts or adds their own in a
thick fugue during which so many
melodies are being sung at once they can
only be grasped as whole sound it always
occurs to me Beethoven wrote
this music when he was entirely
deaf for him it was all just patterns
on a page he had to imagine the confluence
of voices singing in his mind he had
to be a novelist

“Grief runs off us
Like water off a duck”

Ah Waldo Waldo
If only it were so
But it is the verso
Grief seeps in us
Like a blotter takes ink

Running to Satyagraha
I saw a hawk soaring
and every turn every shift of its wings was
sung aloud in the sunny air

The day passes into a book
For a time we are outside
Time at sea in an open boat

Rogue waves hit from nowhere
Cast into the next reality
Shackleton saw a wave so big

He thought it was a cloud
The boat rolled under and came
Up in a new world later

On South Georgia Island
Sleeping in a cave he leaped
To his feet shouting and hit

His head on the roof of the cave
So hard he almost killed himself
Dreaming of that wave

Four birds in the air fighting
kestrel
magpie
crow
hawk
all involved spinning
in a brief spat overhead

At the turning point of my life
I hiked toward Mather Pass.
With every step clouds thickened above
Until the world was roofed in gray.

Thunder rolled from west to east
Like big barrels over a floor
And as I crossed great Upper Basin
It began to snow.

Soon I walked in a white bubble
Slush piled on every rock.
Warm and dry in parka and pants
I felt my life fall away.

I gave it up. Fly away
On the wind, drift into slush,
I’ll never go back! I quit!
Each step up was a step away.

A convex shattered slope of stone
Rose into mist. A boulder wall.
The pass on top, unseen. The trail
Swept up without a switchback,

Right to left in a single shot,
The Muir Trail crew’s one touch of art.
It cost a life: I passed a plaque
And read the name: my own.

Then I was in the pass.
Flakes blew up one side and
Down the other. In the lee I tried
To eat but started shivering. Go.

With easy strides I clumped down
The white Ss on the northern slope
Until I saw the Palisade Lakes,
Far far below. The sun came out.

White lace on wet gold granite,
A new world, a new life,
A new world I’ll make it new!
I passed two hikers setting camp.

Did you come over in that storm?
Yes, I said, I left my life on the other side
And now I’m not afraid.

Stream falling over rock:
Loud music. Night and a candle.

Halfway through this life:
It doesn’t feel so long.

Ridges, cliffs, peaks, cols:
I’ll never stop wanting them.

Ponds, meadows, streams, moss:
My knees number them.

Stars outside my tent door:
All my troubles as far away.

Candleflame, minutes.
Pine needles, months.
Branches, years.
Sand, centuries.
Pebbles, millennia.
The bedrock, eons.
Me and broken sticks.

Can’t see the words.
Waterfall a rope of sound,
Rushing about, pushed by the wind.
Trees black against the stars.

Dim blank white page.
I write on it and see a
Dim blank white page.
The story of my life!

Juniper, tent, rock, dark.
Wind dying. My heart
At peace. A Friday night.

The Big Dipper sits on the mountain.
My friends lie in their tents.
My back against the white rock,
Star bowl spinning overhead:
Feel the movement and soar away.

Who knows how many stars there are,
All those dim ones filling the black
Until it seems no black is there.
And then you see the Milky Way.
The sky should be pure white with stars,
That’s black dust up there blocking the view,
Carbon just like us! All flung together through space
In just this way.

By starlight everything is clear.
Trees are alive. Rocks are sleeping.
Waterfalls, so noisy!
All the rest—
Quiet as my heart.

I remember our night on the ridge
I had seen a nook some years before
Flat sand and shrubs in broken granite
Right on the crest so I thought I could find it
And you were game for anything

We hiked up in late afternoon
Carrying water in our packs
Up in the shadow of the Crystal Range
Up shattered granite all patched with grasses
Until we stepped back into the light

We found the nook and pitched the tent
Between two gnarly junipers
The sun set in the big valley’s haze
The light leaked out of the sky
We leaned against rock cooking our supper

And in the last electric blue
The richest color in all the world
We jerked at a flash in the air above
And jerked again as out of the night
Black shapes dove at both our heads

In the dark we could barely see them
Their quick dives made no sound at all
Too big for bats too quiet for hawks
We ducked it seemed at an onslaught of owls
Out hunting in a little pack