Curves of Pursuit
I
was ill
and
nearly died; Mother, mistaking wheezing lungs
for
passing chill,
trusted
to chicken soup and pills, only to discover me
that
morning, drowning in my breath.
It
was Dr. Guerrant
who
listened to my chest, then turning to her (I saw her colour drain)
said,
Why did you wait so long…
That
was in 1965…
In
the wards a fortnight, reading
Edgar
Rice Burroughs: what else to pretend to,
if
not ‘John Carter on Mars’ − monkish
drifter,
warrior
prince − across those million miles, transfigured
like
him, a death and still my own rebirth?
Now
everything reshapes itself, restates itself
in
my mind… Mother, the ante-bellum clinic
where
I was born (recovering those weeks
across
the hall from that September room) −
the
lobby dark with old displays,
their
high, heavy mahogany housing
photographs
of tribes, of Dr. Guerrant ‘senior’
working
among Indians
before
the Plains were States, the nineteenth century glass-cased…
flint-tipped
canes, a blanket with a moon motif,
the
beaded shaman pouch of spirit herbs.
Today
on TV, I saw the Mars Rover
treading
red, red soil below a digitised horizon.
Before
we came, we invented this place,
made
weather-models binding hemispheres,
synapse
pixels mapping seas
fused
glassy by magma burst
… Mariner…Viking…
announcing dust and blister skies…
under
moons named fear and panic
we
became ourselves, the way a name
is
recalled
beyond
the sunburst launch and hieroglyph of rocket trails,
Mars
in its ceremonies, its long ellipse
around
a farther, fainter sun −
a
sick room beneath this other sky, a lost world
floating
in the dark, beyond this slow decay
to
probate and dementia, savannahs
greening
to
a first breath.
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