Sectarian, too keen for power;
Hard décor glinting black on gold,
We gargled Schnapps atop the fascist’s tower;
Or, when a kind
Samaritan rang up, we merely
Sliced off a bacon rind
And chomped on tortured carcass more severely.
Yet even all of that, sized up with what’s in store
(Apocalypse,
Which, blank, accelerating, slips
Through every gap), is nothing. Unprepared,
Dreamy, we nosedive on. A stranger holds the floor,
Unseen because so strange,
And has declared,
‘I know you may not want to. Spare a little change.’
Mars
Concerns about humanity on Earth
Continue. If a meteor
Can boil the atmosphere,
Our safety’s not assured. If all our art,
Technocracy and dash, the human métier,
Crumbles in fire,
Then for
An aeon dazzling stars
With all their precious stores
Of fuel
Could, fruitless, fail
To be admired by any loving mind.
Blank loss of Eden, vacuumed consciousness –
Our jostling joys fulfil
Old dreams deep pattern made.
We freight the self-inspecting universe.
Sci-fi aficionados long ago
Predicted what would mark
Our next sublime frontier.
They saw we’d leave the planet where we grew
And, honing our space architectures, make
Engine and tyre
To tour
The shifting slopes of Mars.
Above life’s hopeful maze
Of doubt,
Unbound delight
Electrifies the skyline of forevers
We cannot comprehend with spans so short.
Departing from this dot
Of roses, thorns, and clovers,
The Martian holocene awaits our heat.
Just eighty days of travel get us there.
Skylights on Arsia Mons
Open to lava tubes
Where quarters, greenhouses, a water store
Can be installed, with iron and nickel mines
Running as ribs
To hubs
Where steel is manufactured.
In time, when we’ve perfected
A knack
That can connect
Supply lines with our 3D printers, then
Cities and roads will sprawl this second world.
That early bottleneck
Is pressuringly thin
But, on the other side, we’ll reap reward.
What statues shall we build when we arrive?
Will there be new resolves
Not to depict our own
Distinctive bodies? Will the sculptors rave
Instead for ten-dimensional preserves
That swell the town
And yawn,
Defiant, disconcert-
-ing, in and out of sight?
Or will
We choose to wall
Our minds around with restless struggling limbs
Like Pompeii plasters stuck on regolith,
To illustrate our well
Established hope, which climbs
Tirelessly, always striving for new birth?
More distant future promises fresh prizes:
A planet terraformed,
Earth’s human-life-support
Copied at last by an extended process,
Augmenting soil until it can be farmed,
Stocking a port
Replete
With gently lapping waves
Where juicy seaweed writhes
As if
In honour of
Robots that rove the artificial shore
Smoothly designed by us, strange works of nature
Who’ve clambered up the cliff
Of truth enough to share
Creation’s task, so thrive our arts of nurture.
Extremophiles no sunbeam ever stroked,
Beneath an arid crust,
Will glimmer from our torches.
Accelerando, as chalked contrails streaked
Our skies, so tumbling bots will skim the crest
Of dunes. Their touches
In reaches
Unseen, unstudied, will
Feed the eternal well
Of fact
Where we have flocked
So long in search of longed-for understanding.
Sleek satellites, above the fresh clouds’ blear,
Will view the slow effect
Of our fastidious tending:
Blood red, plant green, then oceanic blue.
Still, threat gains magnitude each passing year.
Cold motives we have known
Persist in muffled caves.
We will be injured but we shall inure
To horrors that do not yet have a name.
Discovery cleaves
Our lives
And yet the lips of custom
Will speak for those who kissed them.
We grow
And make the law
Afresh according to our changing needs.
An interplanetary species will
Require a surge of new
Designs. The human nods.
Machine intelligence must help as well.
Yes, this is where we aim: another planet.
Many lithe minds have asked
What we should lionise,
And here exists an answer, one so plain it
Astounds with clarity. Shall we be whisked
Through emptiness
And noise
To summit megaliths,
Slowly raising Klieg lights
On Martian
Settlement, mission
Accomplished, or be swallowed in time’s mist
Like almost every species that has lived?
This is a trial of passion.
We will do what we must.
Bring life to Mars and then bring Mars to life.
The Scientist
Before the time of skiing on Europa,
Enceladus still a far-flung starry dream,
When humankind had met no interloper
To shake its trust in being God’s only scheme –
When hope was cheap (since all the wildest hoper
Concocted was a proton-bashing beam),
When life was good, before the hadron drama,
A scientist lived and labbed in Alabama.
It’s said she changed her body to a vapour
And surged, at hurtling speed, across the prairie
Dispersing dust and ruffling reams of paper
So jottings fluttered free above the airy
September clouds. Her particles could caper
And coalesce as an engorged canary
Which chirped – before her molecules defaulted
To human form, with wing and thorax malted.
She set a gauze of copper near the sun
To gather photons whizzing off its centre,
Which made a fleet of flying saucers run
In fluctuating orbits. Each would enter
Its perihelion before it spun,
With bleeps of data, free, to its inventor
Who plugged these findings in a database
Comprised of maps for charting outer space.
She programmed microscopic drones to fill
Their pores with water, and transport the load
To desert regions, where each cell would spill
A droplet, till a gushing river flowed.
She bioengineered, with chlorophyll
Embedded in a goat’s genetic code,
An animal that synthesized the light
And grew, in hours, to an ungainly height.
And then
she launched a harvester in motion
To capture hurricanoes as they blew
Across the wide and wet Atlantic ocean
And redirect them– where? Ah, no one knew
But sometimes when a town was in commotion
From seismic devastations, quick winds flew,
Like valkyries, to help, and air would bubble
As gusts restored old buildings from the rubble.
Later, she rode a chariot made of glass
And dragged about the ozone-layer by Boeing,
Diffusing thunderclouds and dribbling sparse
Evaporation trails of purple, flowing
Horizon to horizon. When the grass
Absorbed their showers, each spikelet started sowing
Sentient saplings, clustered in societies
That grew to breed high-yielding crop varieties.
She fixed a laser to a diplodocus
Constructed out of fibreglass and fossil,
Then rode it round the town. It was a locus
Classicus for her to shove colossal
Boulders, when thinking, in volcanoes: focus
Came easy watching quartz and lava jostle.
That’s how she chanced on fresh techniques to mould
Confectionary, and cured the common cold.
Controlled manipulations of dark matter
Allowed her to reverse the flow of time:
She set a sludgy pig’s head on a platter
And watched it reassemble from the grime.
She caged a fly and spider: watched the latter
Cough up the former, shrink, and uncombine
The interwoven tightropes of its home.
She made her hair retangle through a comb.
Another of her marvellous inventions
Distinguished large and small infinities
And weighed up cosmological contentions,
Concluding that, for speculative ease,
‘The Multiverse’, with all its many tensions
And the glamour that it gives the lightest breeze,
Awards the most discursive weltanschaung,
A world of trillion-tasselled sturm-und-drang.
She carved a chamber in which gravity
Altered according to one’s state of mind:
It was a vivid wonderment to see
A sapling leave its clod of soil behind
And levitate across a vacancy
To feed an antelope that was confined
And, growing hungry, startled to discover
Its food approaching like a much-missed lover.
Experiments with time proved her undoing.
Sure, she could travel – but who really knew
How far one’s present self was misconstruing
Precisely what one’s future self would do
Or wish to do? This problematic gluing
Of future yearning (judged by what one knew
Was probable) to present hope produced
An attitude both fearful and confused.
And yet she would and should and did continue,
Concocting bots and bugs and neuromatic
Computers, quantum monsters made of sinew
And nanotubule, shambling through her static
Test-spaces. She’d a ray to look within you
And pinpoint thoughts and feelings: an ecstatic
Shudder, a moment of unravelling doubt,
A movement that prompts the moment when you shout.
But no one, as we know by now, is simple.
No one is not in some way complicated.
The smoothest skin can rupture with a pimple.
Our oceans will, one day, be dessicated.
A nun, come Friday nights, discards her wimple
And boozes freely. Even Time – dilated,
Contracted – will, with spatial twisting, differ
At certain points, like swirlings in a river.
She was obsessed with Death. Or rather, not
With Death itself, but with its dissolution.
She wished to put a kibosh on the rot
That saps us everywhere, this foul pollution
Ubiquitously found, which cools the hot
And heats the cool, and proves us Lilliputian
Flies to be swatted. Champions of dissection,
We lack – still, still! – the art of resurrection.
The overthrowing of the overthrowing;
The great undoing of the great undoer;
The banishment of nothing’s bleak unknowing;
The numinous pursuit; the reconstruer
Of what informs us that we should be going;
The fight against what makes us thinner, fewer,
And more despondent year on weary year.
The death of Death. The death, perhaps, of fear.
So she conducted many a detailed test
To study Life and how it might be held.
She mapped the way bacteria divest
Unneeded nutrients, how cells are swelled,
And how flagella mobilise the quest
Through microscopic landscapes. She compelled
All fields. She had a lithe celestial air.
Who was Verona? What had made her care?
Verona’s parents were intense, utopian:
Her dad, a physicist, anti-entropian.
On summer evenings they’d sit late and quaff
Smirnoff together, two straws like fallopian
Tubes that extended to a single trough.
As they got smashed, their brilliant minds would glisten
And young Verona dropped her toys to listen.
Her toys, which were bizarrely whirring things:
A helter-skelter made of ammonite,
A schooner with retractable glass wings,
A futuristic baton-wielding knight,
A tin containing ultraviolet strings
Which she could weave to trip and trick your sight,
And a stack of space-age doodads from her dad,
Designed at Cal Tech when he was a grad.
But now she was a grown-up, all alone,
And dedicated to those tricky arts
Which humankind first called on to see stone
And stick make fire. She held the many parts
Of earthly knowledge in that fertile zone
Behind her eyes, where synapse-linkage darts
Between ideas and, in the course of time,
Discovers separate realms that seem to rhyme.
Phenomenologists would journey far
To witness one experiment in action:
She’d lock a putrid aardvark in a jar
Filled with potassium and some extraction
Shipped in by shuttle from a distant star.
It fizzed and fulminated till reaction
Gave way to calm: subsiding foam revealed
A living aardvark, every lesion healed.
About her other triumphs, I will speak
At greater length hereafter: how she flew
Through far-flung galaxies on just a weak
Duracell battery; how she laughed and threw
Convention to the solar wind to peek
Inside our sun; and how she followed through
On manifold harmonious inventions
That filled the news reports in higher dimensions.
The Centrifuge
1. The Mechanism
‘Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body.’
Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry
Since time is flying everywhere I look,
I take this opportunity to pause.
You, centrifuge, my futuristic book,
You heart of chrome, with ventricles of gauze,
I choose your spin to execute my chores,
&
nbsp; To order what I cannot separate
And formalize the thoughts I cogitate.
You are my whirring, whirling wizard’s cup,
My stern reminder, carpe diem-ator,
You brighten, gladden, buck, and giddy up,
You organise the work I must do later –
You are the schemer of your own creator!
You are my vessel, I your alchemist,
You conjure turn and counterturn and twist.
You mortar and I pestle what you cluster,
You muster and I master what you show.
You cut the mix, you cleave the huff and bluster,
You travel nowhere but you always go –
You hem your margins like La Rochefoucauld.
I tangent where you indicate the line
And follow where your filigrees entwine.
I spirograph around your inspiration,
I take the cues your curlicues suggest,
I draw the line you drop in conversation,
I siphon off what you have coalesced.
You are my desktop mécanique céleste,
My adumbrator and my in-the-groove –
You move in circuits and those circuits move.
So, centrifuge, my counsellor of state,
Enlarge the problems, show them to me plain:
Uncover all the ways of thinking straight
And lead me down discernment’s dusty lane.
You are my second body, other brain!
I am Cincinnatus, you are the plough –
Let matter follow where we furrow now.
2. Time
‘Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river.’ –
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A New Refutation of Time’
If what is due to happen is decided
By noughts and ones, or macromolecules,
I’m happy not to know. Life’s many-sided!
The future rolls and rollicks and unspools –
I’ll follow silver, but no golden, rules.
Tempus fugit? Oh, well let it go!
I would it were not, but it must be so.
Yes, time accelerates, the more you sweat.
Proportion is a nifty-fingered rogue