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  LIFE ON MARS

  BOOKS BY TRACY K. SMITH

  The Body’s Question

  Duende

  Life on Mars

  LIFE ON MARS

  POEMS

  TRACY K. SMITH

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-584-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-659-0

  10 12 14 16 15 13 11 9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920674

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover photo: “Cone Nebula Close Up” © STScI

  for Raf

  CONTENTS

  The Weather in Space

  ONE

  Sci-Fi

  My God, It’s Full of Stars

  The Universe Is a House Party

  The Museum of Obsolescence

  Cathedral Kitsch

  At Some Point, They’ll Want to Know What It Was Like

  It & Co.

  The Largeness We Can’t See

  Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?

  Savior Machine

  The Soul

  The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

  TWO

  The Speed of Belief

  It’s Not

  THREE

  Life on Mars

  Solstice

  No-Fly Zone

  Challenger

  Ransom

  They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected

  FOUR

  The Universe as Primal Scream

  Everything That Ever Was

  Aubade

  Field Guide

  Eggs Norwegian

  The Good Life

  Willed in Autumn

  Song

  Alternate Take

  Sacrament

  When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me

  Us & Co.

  LIFE ON MARS

  THE WEATHER IN SPACE

  Is God being or pure force? The wind

  Or what commands it? When our lives slow

  And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

  In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm

  Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

  After all we’re certain to lose, so alive—

  Faces radiant with panic.

  ONE

  SCI-FI

  There will be no edges, but curves.

  Clean lines pointing only forward.

  History, with its hard spine & dog-eared

  Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

  Just like the dinosaurs gave way

  To mounds and mounds of ice.

  Women will still be women, but

  The distinction will be empty. Sex,

  Having outlived every threat, will gratify

  Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

  For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves

  Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.

  The oldest among us will recognize that glow—

  But the word sun will have been re-assigned

  To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device

  Found in households and nursing homes.

  And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks

  To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,

  Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift

  In the haze of space, which will be, once

  And for all, scrutable and safe.

  MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS

  1.

  We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,

  Only bigger. One man against the authorities.

  Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

  Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand

  The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants

  Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

  Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,

  This message going out to all of space…. Though

  Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

  Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics

  Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine

  A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

  Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,

  Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing

  To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

  While the father storms through adjacent rooms

  Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,

  Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

  Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.

  All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils

  In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

  The books have lived here all along, belonging

  For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence

  Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

  A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

  2.

  Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.

  A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,

  He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

  Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,

  Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,

  Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

  Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.

  I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.

  That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

  Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank

  Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.

  He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

  Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:

  May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.

  Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

  A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, an
d the night air

  Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.

  We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

  Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

  One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.

  Our eyes adjust to the dark.

  3.

  Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

  That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

  When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

  Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

  Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

  Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

  Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

  At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

  If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

  And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

  Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

  Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

  At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

  Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be

  One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

  Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

  And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

  Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

  So that I might be sitting now beside my father

  As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

  For the first time in the winter of 1959.

  4.

  In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001

  When Dave is whisked into the center of space,

  Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light

  Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

  For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

  Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

  Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

  And vague, swirls in, and on and on….

  In those last scenes, as he floats

  Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,

  Over the lava strewn plains and mountains

  Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.

  In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked

  Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,

  Who knows what blazes through his mind?

  Is it still his life he moves through, or does

  That end at the end of what he can name?

  On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,

  Then the costumes go back on their racks

  And the great gleaming set goes black.

  5.

  When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

  They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

  In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.

  He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

  His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

  When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

  To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

  Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

  His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

  As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

  Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

  For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

  We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

  The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

  For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

  The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

  So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

  THE UNIVERSE IS A HOUSE PARTY

  The universe is expanding. Look: postcards

  And panties, bottles with lipstick on the rim,

  Orphan socks and napkins dried into knots.

  Quickly, wordlessly, all of it whisked into file

  With radio waves from a generation ago

  Drifting to the edge of what doesn’t end,

  Like the air inside a balloon. Is it bright?

  Will our eyes crimp shut? Is it molten, atomic,

  A conflagration of suns? It sounds like the kind of party

  Your neighbors forget to invite you to: bass throbbing

  Through walls, and everyone thudding around drunk

  On the roof. We grind lenses to an impossible strength,

  Point them toward the future, and dream of beings

  We’ll welcome with indefatigable hospitality:

  How marvelous you’ve come! We won’t flinch

  At the pinprick mouths, the nubbin limbs. We’ll rise,

  Gracile, robust. Mi casa es su casa. Never more sincere.

  Seeing us, they’ll know exactly what we mean.

  Of course, it’s ours. If it’s anyone’s, it’s ours.

  THE MUSEUM OF OBSOLESCENCE

  So much we once coveted. So much

  That would have saved us, but lived,

  Instead, its own quick span, returning

  To uselessness with the mute acquiescence

  Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:

  Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts

  Ticking through our shirts. We’re here

  To titter at the gimcracks, the naïve tools,

  The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.

  There’s green money, and oil in drums.

  Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books

  Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.

  In the south wing, there’s a small room

  Where a living man sits on display. Ask,

  And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you

  Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands

  And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him

  With a video looping on ad infinitum.

  Special installations come and go. “Love”

  Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,”

  Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see

  (After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?)

  Is an image of the old planet taken from space.

  Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

  CATHEDRAL KITSCH

  Does God love gold?

  Does He shine back

  At Himself from walls

  Like these, leafed

  In the earth’s softest wealth?

  Women light candles,

  Pray into their fistful of beads.

  Cameras spit human light

  Into the vast holy dark,

  And what glistens back

  Is high up and cold. I feel

  Man here. The same wish

  That named the planets.

  Man with his shoes and tools,

  His insistence to prove we exist

  Just like God, in the large

  And the small, the great

  And the frayed. In the chords

  That rise from the tall brass pipes,

  And the chorus of crushed cans

  Someone drags over cobbles

  In the secular street.

  AT SOME POINT, THEY’LL WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE

  There was something about how it felt. Not just the during—

  That rough churn of bulk and breath, limb and tooth, the mass of us,

  The quickness we made and rode—but mostly the before.

  The waiting, knowing what would become. Pang. Pleasure then pain.

  Then the underwater ride of after. Thrown-off like a coat over a bridge.

&
nbsp; Somehow you’d just give away what you’d die without. You just gave.

  The best was having nothing. No hope. No name in the throat.

  And finding the breath in you, the body, to ask.

  IT & CO.

  We are a part of It. Not guests.

  Is It us, or what contains us?

  How can It be anything but an idea,

  Something teetering on the spine

  Of the number i? It is elegant

  But coy. It avoids the blunt ends

  Of our fingers as we point. We

  Have gone looking for It everywhere:

  In Bibles and bandwidth, blooming

  Like a wound from the ocean floor.

  Still, It resists the matter of false vs. real.

  Unconvinced by our zeal, It is un-

  Appeasable. It is like some novels:

  Vast and unreadable.

  THE LARGENESS WE CAN’T SEE

  When our laughter skids across the floor

  Like beads yanked from some girl’s throat,

  What waits where the laughter gathers?

  And later, when our saw-toothed breaths

  Lay us down on a bed of leaves, what feeds

  With ceaseless focus on the leaves?

  It’s solid, yet permeable, like a mood.

  Like God, it has no face. Like lust,

  It flickers on without a prick of guilt.

  We move in and out of rooms, leaving

  Our dust, our voices pooled on sills.

  We hurry from door to door in a downpour

  Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick

  With new rings. All that we see grows

  Into the ground. And all we live blind to

  Leans its deathless heft to our ears

  and sings.

  DON’T YOU WONDER, SOMETIMES?

  1.

  After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span