Martian Garden
Martian Garden
reprinted from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , July/August 2016
with thanks to Mark Aiello
It was the first garden
we’d had there – the soil
of pulverized minerals, more like
mulched machine parts
than proper dirt, but it held root
and got clammy with moisture.
We worked it all day,
and then you stayed up painting it,
on canvas, as though you were in the caves
at Avignon, capturing elk and bison.
You lodged a big earth sun overhead,
all bright and yellow,
and rows of imaginary corn, yellow
stalks and yellow silk, all of it yellow
and beaming, with one gardener among them,
me I think it was, a yellow me, also beaming,
as though the machine-made Martian air
didn’t bite on my lungs with each breath.
Your painting changed things,
and while the plants we have will hardly
be green or even grow, and the sun
will never be pulled closer, no matter
how much pigment you apply, still,
as we worked the next day strewing
our gray spores over the rocks,
I was in your yellow Mars.
we’d had there – the soil
of pulverized minerals, more like
mulched machine parts
than proper dirt, but it held root
and got clammy with moisture.
We worked it all day,
and then you stayed up painting it,
on canvas, as though you were in the caves
at Avignon, capturing elk and bison.
You lodged a big earth sun overhead,
all bright and yellow,
and rows of imaginary corn, yellow
stalks and yellow silk, all of it yellow
and beaming, with one gardener among them,
me I think it was, a yellow me, also beaming,
as though the machine-made Martian air
didn’t bite on my lungs with each breath.
Your painting changed things,
and while the plants we have will hardly
be green or even grow, and the sun
will never be pulled closer, no matter
how much pigment you apply, still,
as we worked the next day strewing
our gray spores over the rocks,
I was in your yellow Mars.