The Martians

No one on Mars has a home

ceaseless wandering motel to motel

those friends I had all moved along

most will never cross paths again

strange to think each life is only

a few years long

settle down in your habits

same thing every day

food rooms streets friends

you can think it will go on

forever

One night I half awoke from a dream

And struggled up to go to the bathroom.

Past bookcases to the foot of the bed, left through

The doorway, touch the wall—but it wasn’t there.

Emptiness: timeless moment, dark nowhere,

The space between the stars—

Ah. A different bedroom

With no wall there, no bookcases—

A straight shot to a different bathroom,

In a different apartment.

I realized where I was and

A whole world slipped away.

In Lazuli Canyon, boating.

Sheet ice over shadowed stream

Crackling under our bow.

Stream grows wide, curves into sunlight:

A deep bend in the ancient channel.

Plumes of frost at every breath.

Endless rise of the red canyon,

Canyon in canyons, no end to them.

Black lines web rust sandstone:

Wind-carved boulder over us.

There, on a wet red beach—

Green moss, green sedge. Green.

Not nature, not culture: just Mars.

Western sky deep violet,

Two evening stars, one white one blue:

Venus, and the Earth.

The red rock and sand are all under water

that we ourselves pumped out of the ground

drowning what little we knew at the time

of this place as it was in the air

like gas burned off in a welder’s fire

The whole world flicking before us like fire

tossing its orange flames into the air

that was not here at the time

we first stepped out on this ground

where everything is writ in water

The baby cries out

I get up to check

He is still asleep

I go back to bed

So many hours

Spent like this

Awake in the night

The family asleep

Wife moves her leg against me

Wind pours in the south window

Rumble of distant night train

Crickets’ vibrant electric chorus

Thoughts pulsing up and down

Mind ranging here and there

How many times

Above the dip of the pass float clouds.

Sunbeams spray the skyline ridge.

White granite, orange granite,

Patches of snow. A lake.

Clustered in rocks,

Trees. Shadows.

The lake ripples its

Chill snow reflections:

Fish, breaking the surface.

Blooming circles on the water,

Why can’t the heart grow as fast?

Toss and turn in rumpled sheets

Hot but cold. Small pains

Smolder in the flesh.

Gears of the mind half-engaged:

The years grind jumbled and broken.

Regret, nostalgia, grief-at-nothing,

Grief-at-something, worry at this and that,

Anxiety without cause, confusion,

The past: remember? remember?

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

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

The way so much of it had to be

inferred through the suits we walked in

cut off from the touch of the world

we watched like pilgrims

in love from afar alight

with fire in the body itself felt

as a world the mind apulse in a living

wire of thought tungsten in

darkness the person as planet

the surface of Mars the inside

of our souls aware each

to each and all to all

The way we knew the way had changed

and never again would remain the same

long enough for us to understand it

The way the place was just there

the way you were just thinking stone there

The way everything we thought we knew

in the sky fell away and left us

standing in the visible world

patterned by wind to a horizon

you could almost touch a little

prince on a little world looking for

The way the stars shone at noon

on the flanks of the big volcanoes

poking through the sky itself

out into space we walked in space

and on the sand at once and knew

we knew we were not at home the way

We always knew we were not

at home we are visitors on this planet

the Dalai Lama said on Earth

we are here a century at most

and during that time we must try

to do something good something useful

The way the Buddha did with our lives

the way on Mars we always knew this

always saw it in the bare face

of the land under us the spur

and gully shapes of our lives

all bare of ornamentation

red rock red dust the bare

mineral here of now

and we the animals standing in it

We were brothers in those days you and I

Mom off to work ten hours a day

No child care no friends no family

So off we went on our merry way

To a nearby park walled by city streets

Where Jamaican nannies watched us play

One eye on their charges all stunned by the heat

Kids here and there mom following daughter

Me following you so cautious and neat

Hands gripped as you rose on the teeter-totter

Intent as you stepped on the bouncy bridge

Then tossed your head back burbling laughter

When you reached solid ground and stood on the edge

Looking back at the span you had crossed without falling

Plop on the grass to eat our first lunch

You tease as we eat your laughter upwelling

Pretend to refuse your apple juice

Knock it aside and laugh at its spilling

And laugh again at the flight of a bluejay

Off to used bookstores’ dim musty aisles

Retrieving the books you have pulled out and used

To toss on the ground and collect people’s smiles

Until I stop you and you throw a fit

And so into the backpack off hiking for miles

Your forehead snug on the back of my neck

Home then to microwave Mom’s frozen milk

So that when you wake ravenous for it

I’ll have tested the temperature with a lick

And can lay you out in my elbow’s nook

And watch you suck to the last squick squick

And then you nap again I write my book

And for an hour I am on Mars

Or sitting at my desk lost in thought as I look

Down at the perpetual parade of cars

Your cry wakes us both from this dream

And we’re back at it the movement of the stars

No more regular than our routine

Untellable tedium not just the diapers

The spooning of food the screams

But also the weekly pass of the street sweeper

The hours together playing with blocks

I set them up you knock them down nothing neater

And all the time you learning to talk

Glossolalia peppered with names

Simple statements firm orders Let go walk

Telling me to do things a game

That made you laugh also knowing

When things were in different ways the same

Blue truck blue sky your face glowing

With delight as your language grew

Till description became a kind of telling

Power I spit out the sun I sky the blue

Sitting in that living room together

Each in his own world surprised by new

Things spaced out lost to each other

Used to each other like Siamese twins

Confined to the house by steamy weather

Me watching volleyball on ESPN

Listening to Beethoven reading the Post

You moving your trucks around babbling when

You felt like it absorbed focused lost

In your own space so fully that watching you

I forgot my many selves collapsed to one and was most

Happy the past is gone David I asked beloved of

God do you remember Bethesda

The way my mother would have

Asked me Do you remember Zion

And David looked at me curiously and said No

Dad not really I know how the house looked but all

That comes from pictures in Mom’s albums you know

Yes my first memory is not of Zion but

California the Christmas I was three a brown

Trike put together by my dad next to the tree but

My dad tells me he bought the trike assembled

How can we say what did or did not

Happen David watching you I tremble

You know the world are sophisticated

You say you do not remember

That time and now you know so much of hate

Of anguish of death

Will you ever again be so elated

By the sight of swans swimming under the wharf

Shrieking with laughter as they dove for tossed bread

I hope we are these moments deeper than self

Deeper than memory always connected

Inside each other hoping

This helps hope stave off dread

Brother of mine boy receding

I will try to remember for us

The time when you could be so purely happy

Hiking alone in the Sierra Nevada

I stopped one evening in Dragon Basin

Above treeline by a small stream

Trickling down a flaw in the granite

On the floor of this crack were

Lush little lawns green moss

Furring the banks krummholz bonsai

Clustering over low black falls

Transparent water glossed on top

Standing there I looked

Over the fellfield basin a cupped

Hand of stone catching rocks

Inlaid with a tapestry of plants

Lichen sedge and saxifrage

Tippling green the pebble all bare

Under jagged ridges splintering the sky

Beside the rill I made my camp

Ground cloth foam pad sleeping bag

Pack for a pillow stove at my feet

In the failing light my dinner steaming

To the gurgle of water and the sky

And the stars popping into existence

Over the crest of the range still

Alpenglow pink spiking indigo

The line between the colors pulsing

As they faded to two shades of black the number

Of stars amazing the Milky Way perfectly

Articulating my fall up and into sleep

And was never tired

Dreamed the same dreams

And heard the rockslides rattle and thunder

In the throats of these living mountains

Something woke me I put on my glasses

I lay looking up at stars and the Perseids

Meteors darting across the starry black

Every few heartbeats every direction

Fast slow long short far near

White or some a shade of red some

Seeming to hiss slow down break up

Firing great sparks away to the sides

In their wakes I watched held by granite

Entrained to a meteor shower beyond

Any I had imagined possible the stars

Still fixed in their places lighting

The great shattered granite walls

Of the basin all pale witness

Together to fireworks one

Plowing the air right over the peaks

Fizzing sparks over Fin Dome

One shot down just overhead

Wow I cried and sat up to look

As a great BOOM knocked me into

A dark land sparked by fire

Fires burning My God

I cried oh my God oh my God

Struggling to get out of bag into boots

On my feet out stumbling around a smell

Like autumn leaves burning the past

I took up my water bag and crashed about

Quenching fires that reignited

As I ran to the next oh my God

And ran to the stream and stopped thinking

That here was the action of my life

Putting out fires where there was no wood

Vision crisscrossed with afterimages

Of the final fall green bolts

In every blink of the eye finally

I stood in the dark understanding

There was no need to hurry

I came to a chunk of vivid orange

A stone standing alone on a slab

A meteorite still glowing with heat

I sat down before it

I calmed my breathing

Cross-legged I watched it glow

I put my hand out to it

I could feel its heat some distance

Away the pure color of fire

Films feathering on its surface

Incandescent in the night

Illuminating the glacial polish

Of the slab reflecting in that black

Mirror the night quiet the air still

Slightly smoky the stars again

Fixed in their places the meteor

Shower past its peak the stream

Chuckling as it had all along

Oblivious to the life in the sky

A companion of sorts as I watched

The burning visitation warm

My hands as it filmed over

Darkening in its orange

Brilliance until it was both orange

And black I went to get my sleeping

Bag to drape me in my vigil

Sleep gone again so many nights

Like that but this time justified by

My visitor cooling aglow black flakes

Crusting over growing

Orange darker underneath

The moon rose over the jagged peaks

Bathed the basin in its cool light

Flecked the water in the stream

Dark air holding invisible light

The meteorite now black over orange

Still warm still the center

Of all that basin dark on its slab

Of polished pale granite

In the dawn the rock was purest black

Of course I took it home with me

And put it on mantelpiece as a

Memento of that night and a mark

Of where we stand in the world but

I will always remember how it felt

The night it shot down out of the sky

And it glowed orange as I sat beside it

And it warmed me like a little sun