Chapter 30
If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems
If Wang Wei lived on Mars, we’d spend more time outdoors
1. Visiting
2. After a Move
3. Canyon Color
4. Vastitas Borealis
5. Night Song
6. Desolation
7. Another Night Song
8. Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art
1. What’s in My Pocket
2. In the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
3. Reading Emerson’s Journal
4. The Walkman
5. Dreams Are Real
6. Seen While Running
9. Crossing Mather Pass
10. Night in the Mountains
1. Camp
2. The Ground
3. Writing by Starlight
11. Invisible Owls
12. Tenzing
13. A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy
14. The Reds’ Lament
15. Two Years
16. I Say Good-bye to Mars
VISITING
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
AFTER A MOVE
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.
CANYON COLOR
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.
VASTITAS BOREALIS
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
NIGHT SONG
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
DESOLATION
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?
ANOTHER NIGHT SONG
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!
SIX THOUGHTS ON THE USES OF ART
for Pierre-Paul Durastanti and Yves Frèmion
1. What’s in My Pocket
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
2. In the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
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
3. Reading Emerson’s Journal
“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
4. The Walkman
Running to Satyagraha
I saw a hawk soaring
and every turn every shift of its wings was
sung aloud in the sunny air