Ah the face on Mars

is no face at all

and I mean once and for all

it has gone the way of the canals--

Lowell envisioned them
as a webwork of lifelines
drawing water from the pole,
a cluster of capillaries fading
into filaments of tenuous hope,
webs of wishful thinking,
lines linking smudges
on a pockmarked face.

Poor Percival, his Grail crumbled:
no desperate civilization
was sucking last hope out of the icecap.
Mars seems now lifeless as the moon,
battered, poisonous--but still beckons.

Vikings came, took dirt and found no germs,
took pictures of a docile, dusty sky, ruddy sunset
no eyes or tongue could glorify, rusty rock-strewn desert
blasted by dust-storms blanketing this world we love
to conjure. Water flowed there once
and may still.
Pyramids may have sprouted
among those weird circles
along the shores of rivers
now cracks and wrinkles.

Our robots are the only creatures roving there.

Yet Mars is still a cratered face, and has a heart
our heart? shriveled and sere
our face, is it happy? or a future I fear.
 

©2001 by Joseph D. Andriano