Well, first off, it’s not home.
Your sharp intake of breath
tells you that, as you clock the horizon-to-horizon stars
from the Mars robot’s black-bubble swivelling eye
all is uncanny: the planet’s surface cold and empty as death,
and the surface of Mars like the ground
in the video games you played
before Xbox, hanging around
with the big machines in some dim arcade
putting coins in and smelling sweat and spilled Coke and Blue Stratos cologne
glad for the darkness,
throat swollen with crying over something at home,
and grimly traversing, like a minesweeper, some dystopic nightmare landscape
acres and acres of nothing
running through it with a smoking gun,
life energy running out before your eyes.
6th of March 2021 and Facebook brings this footage:
the night sky from the surface of Mars,
because wonders never cease, and the probe has the capability
to scan sky none of us will ever look up and see:
sky like you’ve spilled a bag of rice on a black floor
and of course there’s the scrabbling search a moment later
for something more; some fumbling release:
the small blue dot, somewhere in that glittering alien mess
which is us.
No sign, and unfathomable, the distance this footage has come
and the swoop of panicked nausea that accompanies it,
like watching the Russian cosmonauts in their suits
crawling across the outside of their craft
gloved fingers shaking as they desperately tried
to replace some bolt on the hatch
clinging on hard and nowhere to hide,
the umbilical line of their oxygen
snaking after them, out there in the black.
Space, the final frontier, sold to us in twenty-cent increments
as a dream of perfect and flawless escape:
climbing into a sticky chipboard arcade booth
feeding in coins for Space Invaders
wanting out, wanting anything except this, the awful truth
of your airless life, clinging to the vacuum-sealed door
waiting for the escape hatch to open like an iris.
‘Blue,’ said Yuri Gagarin, when they asked him
how Earth looked to him from space,
‘I see the Earth’s surface through the window,
the sky is black. And circling the Earth, circling the horizon
is a very beautiful blue halo,
that darkens as it moves away from the surface.’
Here, looking at the night sky from Mars
your lost craft still circling, glutted on infinite unrecognisable stars,
still waiting, with a new terror, for word of re-entry,
it’s the sudden robotic camera swivel that reveals
an upside-down Milky Way
(the only familiar thing there, dear as a face)
which brings that tightening to the throat
some mark to remember home, appearing in space
like a flare in the dark maw of the universe.
How beautiful it is! marvelled Gagarin
and you go outside, stumbling like a sleepwalker
to push your shivering hands into the dirt.
