The Martian's Regress by J. O. Morgan

Author:J. O. Morgan [Morgan, J. O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473573918
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Martian Visits the Museum

With hardly a glance the martian passed on

Through the well-trodden halls of industrial science

Devotional monuments to a numerical god

Such an obsession with heavy metals

A cumbersome religiosity.

He dragged his feet down corridors of warring paraphernalia

Each tiresome avenue showing

Ever more complicated ways in which to do

Something altogether straightforward.

But he lingered at the taxidermy cabinets

Marvelling at the balding scalps, the sunken cheeks

The joints reinforced with plaster and gauze

The dry and lustreless furs.

Leaning in he read each small blue plastic plaque

A common name above an etched extinction date.

He opened up the enclosures and set to work.

When he was finished

Several stiff-limbed impala were tangled

Through the wheels of a steam locomotive

While small varnished fish lay on their sides

Spaced evenly along the buffered tracks.

Above this numerous sun-dried insects

Their pins still sticking out

Had been glued to the green and yellow underside

Of a nine-foot gravity bomb.

A reticulated python had the barrel of a Lewis gun

Half-lodged down its gullet

The tip of its tail curled round and posted

Through the trigger guard.

Mismatched farm animals gleefully lowered each other

Into a nuclear reactor

Their trotters and teats glowing red.

A goggle-eyed Kodiak bear

Its hair on end its forepaws held aloft

Sat in the seat of the first lunar rover

Teetering on the brink of a high balcony.

While in the museum’s central atrium

A resin-skinned sperm whale held in its prised-wide jaws

A kidney dialysis machine

Hard rubber hoses and bare-ended wires

Trailing from its teeth.

Heading on out past the front desk the martian

Reached up and tore off a season ticket.

There was still a great deal of work to be done

And he was sure to discover more stock in the museum’s vaults.

He’d come back in a month or so to see

How things were progressing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.