The Lakes of Mars by Chris Orsman

Author:Chris Orsman [Orsman, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Lakes of Mars

Not airless,

but there’s no insect life

to set the air moving;

no birds this far inland,

and even the mummified seal,

lying not far from the shore,

found her spacesuit lacking

as she crawled here from the coast

a hundred years ago:

forty miles inland, she starved

and crumbles at her own pace,

friable witness among the stones

to the exobiology of this

open-air refrigerator.

It’s business as usual:

we hike across Lake Bonney’s

star-fractured lens,

taking ourselves further out

than we’ve ever gone before,

right to the planetary edge

and beyond, to what this lake

neatly simulates: an ice-bound

port to the solar system,

a mirror of the lakes of Mars.

Crunching over waters

that carry the imprint of BC

in their toxic depths, we are

as tentative as Gulliver

among miniature cathedrals of ice

shattering at our approach.

Far far below the two-metre

plug of ice, below the spoked

and fairy-palace shimmer

of the lake surface, there’s

the murmur of underground cisterns,

a tidal edginess or eagerness

in the buried water, a glitch

that erupts now and then

like static.

We carry a thick plank

to bridge the slushy shore ice;

hoisted on a shoulder, it’s acquired

an absurd value here where timber

is scarce. The sun this morning

burns as cool as a Davy lamp,

and a thin layer of air above

the surface comes at us like a sheet

shaken out on a frosty morning.

One part of the lake is fanned out

in icy gravestones, yet there is

no company of the dead

anywhere near this valley,

and menace is defused in the scene

by our low jesting banter.

There’s just that note of exile,

grey dregs of a moonlit walk

in a dream or nightmare,

as the hinterland looms

across the far shore, and

Charon’s boat is a raft of ice

fixed fast to its moorings.

Someone

bends down and eats some ice:

It’s bitter, he says, tastes like iron.

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