Kim Robinson - The Martians

A strange disjunction of the senses
Wings baffled to damp their noise
So we heard nothing except the stove
Yet saw the steep black strobe approaches
The braking the sharp glides turning away

Then one came close we sensed the talons
I picked up the stove and held it aloft
A Bluet canister with blue flames burning
Bright in the dark blue expanse of space
Beyond it black wings flitting away

We laughed with just a touch of a shiver
Actually to be considered as food
Above the stars popped out all over
Netted in the Milky Way
And afterimages of blue flame

Then we lay in our blue tent
The moon rose and our air turned blue
A blue still in us
It will always be with us
All the color of the twilight sky

All the time and space we travel
The years pass so many now
Falling asleep owls twirl overhead
I feel the granite under our bodies
We soar in blue without a sound

Tenzing did not speak much English
Hungry food tired rest
Paragraphs from a power in the land

Teahouse to teahouse he led us
Across land scored deep
Rivers in mountains no end to them

He arranged our food
He arranged our sleep
He showed us the way

Up the gorge of the Dudh Khosi
Green leaves leeches everything wet
Always within the monsoon clouds

One evening they cleared and there
Above the peaks above the clouds
Another range above the world

We walked up there
Namche Bazaar perched in space
Thyangboche Pengboche Pheriche

Up glacier canyons up their walls
Over ice and rock to Gorak Shep
Dead Crow the last teahouse

Dawn struggle up Kala Pattar
Sit on the peak necks craned up
To look at Everest

Massive slab bright in the sky
Sargarmatha Chomolungma
Mother Goddess of the World

Tenzing pointed at South Col
Fabled last camp littered with gear
Terrible stories corpses

Tenzing had been there four times
Portering up and down Khumbu Icefall
The sidewalk over the white abyss

Where any moment the world could crash
And end it all a place in other words
Like any other place we stand

Beside Tenzing we do not yet know
The world and the icefall are the same
We see it in his face’s Himalaya

Gleaming like ice in the sun
Windy he said South Col very windy
He was fifty-four

Later that morning Lisa got sick
He led her down by the hand
Offering tea sips of water

And brought us down to Pheriche
Helped run the teahouse while Lisa recovered
Helped the Sherpani who cooked all day

Led us to the ancient monastery
Showed us the wall of demon masks
Took us to Thyangboche in the rain

Made sure we saw the monks’ mandala
Five men in red sitting and laughing
Over a circle of colored sands

Rubbing funnels with sticks
To free trickles of red green yellow blue
Intent then a joke and we three

Sitting with them through a dark rainy day
We sit there still in some inner space
He led us back down into the world

Down to Namche down down to Lukla
The little airstrip hacked into the wall
Of the gorge an outpost of everything

Led us into the Sherpa Co-op at dusk
Everyone in there watching TV
Powered by the Honda generator out back

A video of the Live Aid concert
Everyone stunned at the sight
Of Ozzy Osborne chewing up the stage

Tenzing the man who led us
Who took care of us who taught us
Finished eating and crossed the room

Crouched beside me gestured at the TV
America? he said
No I said no that’s England

On my forty-third birthday I was nearly done
With Mars the drafts were in a shambles
Beauty in a novel (as in everything) is
An emergent property emerging
Late in the process and before that all
Is chaos and disorder but my hopes
Were high I felt that it was coming
Together I wanted the final push to be
The convergence of everything I wanted
Unreasonable things I had in my possession
Some bits of Mars a gram or two of the SNC
Meteorite that fell on Zagama Nigeria
In October of 1962 after thirteen million years
In space little gray chunks of rock
Mounted in a necklace given to my wife
I unscrewed the casing took out a chunk
Climbed onto my roof at sunset
A clear day crows flying back
From the fields the coastal range dark
To the west gilt clouds above it
The vault still blue the wind fresh
From the delta and there I was
On the roofbeam of my house in the middle of
My life in the open air about to eat a rock
That if not fraudulent a piece of Jersey
Was an actual chunk of the next planet out
It felt odd even in the performance
I have never been able to explain
Myself but can only note that in the
Attempt to imagine Mars I came to see
Earth more clearly than ever before
This beautiful world now alive
With the drama of an everyday sunset
Black birds sailing east in lines
Under my feet my home the sun
Touching the coastal range I put the rock in
My mouth all went on as before
No electric shiver that the sunset itself did not
Provide no speaking in tongues I bit down
It was too hard to break in my mouth
Tongued it side to side tasted no taste
Ran it over my teeth a little rock
Most of it would pass through me
But the stomach’s fierce acids would
Surely tear at the surface of the rock
And some few atoms I hoped would stick
As carbon incorporated into my bones
For their seven-year cycle or
For good perhaps and so I sat
Digesting Mars and the view the sun
Ablink through the Berryessa gap
The wind rising each life has its trajectory
Up and down in the shimmer of ordinary moments
Sudden euphoria stab of grief the pattern dustdevil
Funneling down spiraling up in most
Exquisite sensitive dependence
On unknown factors that dusk nothing of the sort
Happened it was a matter of will a
Meditative discipline exerted day after
Day for years to make a world
Transparent in me and my mind at home
And as I swallowed parts of another world
This one wheeled about me like a veritable
California

They never got it right
not any of them not ever
never on Earth by definition
nor hardly ever on Mars itself
the way it was back in the beginning
the way it was before we changed it

The way the sky went red at dawn
the way it felt to wake under the sun
light in the self rock under boot
.38 g even in our dreams
and in our hopes for our children

The way the way always came clear
even in the worst of the gimcrack chaos
Ariadne’s thread appearing or not
in the peripheral moment lost
lost then found and walking on
a sidewalk through the shattered land